Collapsed Empires: That which is Sustainable until

 To continue with our Andean Empire collapses.  Not all empires collapsed due to over expansion.  In some cases they appear to be fairly sustainable.  Until they were not...

The City of Caral in the Supe Valley is the Americas first known city.  To give a frame of reference, it lasted an equivalent time period to the death of Christ until today.

The Supe seemed to thrive in the valley for about 2,000 years. But around 3,600 years ago, an enormous earthquake -- Moseley estimates its magnitude at 8 or higher -- or series of earthquakes struck Caral and a nearby coastal settlement, Aspero, the archaeologist found…

News Release, Science Dailey January 9, 2009

The full pdf above has some excellent photographs and illustrations of the geo-architectural evidence and is very much recommended.  My excerpts are from the press release and thus are somewhat of a teaser.

I first hear of this empire in:

1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

First came the earthquakes, then the torrential rains. But the relentless march of sand across once fertile fields and bays, a process set in motion by the quakes and flooding, is probably what did in America's earliest civilization.

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So concludes a group of anthropologists in a new assessment of the demise of the coastal Peruvian people who built the earliest, largest structures in North or South America before disappearing in the space of a few generations more than 3,600 years ago.

From Earthquakes, El Ninos Fatal To Earliest Civilization In Americas ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2009)

News Release, Science Dailey January 9, 2009

and

Environment change and economic development in coastal Peru between 5,800 and 3,600 years ago

Environmental change and economic development in coastal Peru between 5,800 and 3,600 year ago full text

The City of Caral,…confirmed as the oldest city in the Americas, Caral has shattered the myth that civilization got a late start in the New World. Nearly 5,000 years ago, around the time that Sumerians developed writing and before Egyptians built the Great Pyramid at Giza, people… in the Supe River Valley began building a city. 

They knew nothing about writing and had no knowledge of ceramics. But they planned and built huge public works, evolved a specialized and stratified society, and developed a sophisticated and diversified economy…They fished with nets, irrigated fruit orchards, and grew cotton and a variety of vegetables.

Most impressively, the Supe built extremely large, elaborate, stone pyramid temples -- thousands of years before the better-known pyramids crafted by the Maya. The largest so far excavated, the Pirámide Mayor at inland settlement Caral, measured more than 550 feet long, nearly 500 feet wide and rose in a series of steps nearly 100 feet high. Walled courts, rooms and corridors covered the flat summit.

A civilization arises because it controls something important. Mesopotamia prospered once it irrigated the desert and produced an abundance of food. Caral diverted water from the Supe River to irrigate fields, growing staples such as squash and beans. But its secret weapon may have been cotton. By growing cotton, used to make fishing nets, the people of Caral could trade for fish with the communities on the Pacific coast 12 miles away. Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of fish bones.

The community also traded with communities in the jungle farther inland and, apparently, with people from the mountains…. The Supe Valley hosts other communities, some of them much older and some within view of the city itself, but none of them approaches the scale and sophistication of this city.

By Laurent Belsie, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor / January 3, 2002 http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0103/p11s1-woam.html

The earthquake collapsed walls and floors atop the Pirámide Mayor and caused part of it to crumble into a landslide of rocks, mud and construction materials. Smaller temples at Aspero were also heavily damaged, and there was also significant flooding there, an event recorded in thin layers of silt unearthed by the archaeologists…

The earthquake destabilized the barren mountain ranges surrounding the valley, sending massive amounts of debris crashing into the foothills. Subsequent El Niños brought huge rains, washing the debris into the ocean. There, a strong current flowing parallel to the shore re-deposited the sand and silt in the form of a large ridge known today as the Medio Mundo. The ridge sealed off the formerly rich coastal bays, which rapidly filled with sand.

Strong ever-present onshore winds resulted in "massive sand sheets that blew inland on the constant, strong, onshore breeze and swamped the irrigation systems and agricultural fields," the paper says. Not only that, but the windblown sand had a blasting effect that would have made daily life all but impossible, Moseley said.

The bottom line: What had for centuries been a productive, if arid, region became all but uninhabitable in the span of just a handful of generations. The Supe society withered and eventually collapsed, replaced only gradually later on -- by societies that relied on the much more modern arts of pottery and weaving, Moseley said.

With much of the world's population centers built in environmentally vulnerable areas, the Supe's demise may hold a cautionary tale for modern times, the researchers said. El Niño events, in particular, may become more common as global climate change continues.

"These are processes that continue into the present," said Dan Sandweiss, the paper's lead author and an anthropology professor and graduate dean at the University of Maine.

Affirmed Moseley, "You would like to say that people learn from their mistakes, but that's not the case."

Authors Mosley and Sandweiss

From Earthquakes, El Ninos Fatal To Earliest Civilization In Americas ScienceDaily (Jan. 20, 2009)

Collapsed Empires: The Wari

The Andean region that makes up the current country Peru is much larger than is readily apparent.  Dwarfed by the Amazonian giant Brazil, it looks rather petite.  But it is the combined size of California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, and Montana.

The Wari Empire was on of a number of Empires that sprung up over time in Andean prehistory.  The Wari are often cited as precursors to the Inca, and lasted much longer than they did (AD 600 to 1000).  The Wari are credited with building the road network that the Incas later took as their own.

There is a fair amount of evidence that the Wari were a warlike people.  At the very end of their history they were met by the giant fortress edifice of Kuelap; built by the Chachapoyan  (Cloud People) as a citadel.  This fortress contains 3 times more material than the larges of Egypt’s pyramids.  Obviously the Wari were taken seriously.

As with many expansionist Empires their territory grew until they either ran into other large groups they were not able to defeat, or into barren territory that could not yield enough resources to make it pay.  The Wari are a little different than some empires in that they appeared to bypass a considerable amount of material that they did not feel worth conquering.  It is a little as if the Romans had marched through Germany (bypassing the Goths, et al) to conquer the Angles and Jutes in what is now Denmark.

At the end of the period the Wari ran into two groups, the Cajamarca and the Sican at the northern and southern edges of their territory.   These groups appeared to be large enough or fierce enough that they halted their expansion.

An overlay of Wari Empire on the Map of Modern Peru

Kathatina J. Schreiber,  from state to empire: the expansion of the Wari outside the Ayacucho Basin  from The Origins and Development of the Andean State:

It is a curious aspect of most empires, at least those of the extensive type, that once they cease to expand they do not seem able to maintain themselves.  This certainly seems true of the Wari.  Furthermore, once this point had been reached, the economic and political organization of Wari had changed to such a degree (it was so geared to an expansionist economy, if you will) that not only did the empire collapse, but the Wari [homeland] state within Ayacucho Basin also collapsed, and Wari was abandoned.  In addition those polities where tied to the Wari…also collapsed.

 

But Not For Long: Michelle Widgen

But Not for Long by Michelle Wildgen is a  recently release novel that takes you through the lives of three people during three days of economic collapse in Madison Wisconsin: a collapse signaled by an extended power outage.  It is written for a main stream fiction audience and has the general nuances that implies:  pretty, capable women with problems; good dialog, slow pacing , good description. Proof of this would be that they put a dog by the lake, rather than the authress with a tommy gun, on the front cover.

That the characters share neo-hippy housing on what would have been the tony lake front area in the center of the city, and are definitely of the NPR already sets the book apart from the usual ilk of world ending fiction. 

The characters are living in that odd alternate universe of college town alternative living.  They are relatively young with the oldest being about 42.  But the book has honesty in that the characters attach a lot importance to living the low footprint lifestyle, but have a strong attachment to the “regular” world with their “day jobs.” 

In fact, fairly clearly, their day jobs are some sense all require monetary inputs from the normal commercial economy to survive.  Karen, the 20-something writes for a cheese industry publication, Greta in her early 40s is a fund raiser for a small private college, and Hal in his late 30s is a scheduler/controller for a food bank-food service charity.

Although the food service is in some senses the least connected to the “real economy” it is actually in a position to see problems coming in first.

The warehouse manager being out, Hal takes a side trip to the Food Bank’s warehouse:

This is a world primarily running amok in overheating as global warming slowly takes its toll.  But there are ongoing (presumably oil induced) low intensity (nothing nuclear) wars ongoing: further draining the budget. 



That pleased him.  He was whistling as he flung open the door to the main cooler, the huge cold room where all their food was housed on tall metal shelves, and his whistle had echoed off the walls. Two of the warehouse workers, in sweatshirts and puffy jackets were standing before a pallet of packaged rolls and loaves of bread.  There was a shelf of frozen vegetables, and a few stacked pallets of canned soup.  But the rest of the room, the great expanse of which was usually filled with food, was emptied.  There were some bins of produce and a few gallons of milk that only looked paltrier against such emptiness.

Throughout, the usual interpersonal bickering and politicking found within groups of people goes on.  Greta is in (unsuccessful) hiding from her drunk (non-violent fortunately) husband.  Although he nearly non-functional with his ongoing drunkenness, as a lawyer he has been the source of her relative wealth.

There is a fair amount going on at a secondary level of symbolism.  A abandoned out on the lake, is helped to swim ashore has very much more the tone of Cerberus, the crossing of the River Styx, and the entrance to the end time: Hades.

The drunken Husband is very much in line with a drunken society,  living of accumulated successes, and anticipating the final collapse.  At the end it is somewhat in the air whether, in AA terms, society had hit the rock bottom.  In the one rare instance we see the world from Will, the drunk husbands, point of view:

The fact was, you’d never know you were done till your feet touched the silt. He thought he hit that point once before, but that was different.  This sensation had turned out to be a relief. All the machinations and rationalizations he’d pent year trying to work out-it was actually very demanding not just to drink the way he did but to try and justify it, too-had fallen away it was all so simple.

Deep down, Will just felt it was unlikely that this was really it for them, for a culture that adored its structures and complexity, adored being moved and transported.  Then again, it was also such a half-assed culture in so many ways-he could imagine them having created a vast flimsy infrastructure that was only good for fifty or sixty years,, forever assuming someone else would renew and replace it.

Although the ending has some scope for optimism, the overall tone of the book would probably argue it is too little, too late.

On Top for Now

“Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing.”

Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future. By Ian Morris. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 750 pages; $35.  Amazon

From the Economist's Review:

What Mr Morris shows is that over a period of 10,000 years one civilisation after another hit a “hard ceiling” of social development before falling apart, unable to control the forces its success had unleashed. For every two or three steps forward, there was at least one step back. During those periods of advance the West tended to pull ahead of the East, and during the steps back the gap narrowed again.