The End of the House of Saud

Peter Turchin (who I seem to quote a bit) had a piece from a few years ago about the high likely hood of the collapse of the Saudi Arabia.  Given that many people’s post apocalyptic scenario involves peak oil, this should be a matter of some interest.

One of the hallmarks of a mature discipline is its ability to make predictions thatcan be used to test scientific theories…

The specific case study I develop is the possible state collapse in Saudi Arabia. The theoretical setting is provided by the demographic-structural theory of state collapse. The starting point is a previously developed model for political cycles in agrarian societies with nomadic elites, loosely based on the ideas of Ibn Khaldun. I modify the model to fit the characteristics of the modern Saudi Arabian state and estimate its parameters using data from published sources. The model predicts that the sovereign debt of Saudi Arabia will reach unmanageable proportions some 5- 20 years in the future; the fiscal collapse will be followed by a state collapse in short order.

The core of the theory, as it is currently formulated (Turchin 2003: Chapter 7, following Goldstone I call it the demographic-structural theory), concerns the relationship between population growth and fiscal stability of the state. Briefly, population growth in excess of the productivity gains from the land leads to persistent inflation and rising real costs, which outstrip the ability of the state to increase tax revenues. Rapid expansion of population also results in an increased number of aspirants for elite positions, putting further fiscal strains on the state, and intensifying intra-elite competition and factionalism. Increased rural misery, urban migration, and falling real wages lead to frequent food riots and wage protests; expansion of youth cohorts contributes to the population mobilization potential; and elite competition and popular discontent fuel ideological conflicts. As all these trends intensify, the end result is state bankruptcy and consequent loss of military control; elite movements of regional and national rebellion; and a combination of elite-mobilized and popular uprisings that manifest the breakdown of central authority (Goldstone 1991:25).

Scientific Prediction in Historical Sociology: Ibn Khaldun meets Al Saud1

Peter Turchin University of Connecticut, December 11, 2003.

The primary variables appear to be:

• Outside influences
• Cutting budget deficits
• Reducing population growth
• Asset sell-off

He includes liberalization of political system: but not that it is unclear how this would change the underlying system.

What is particularly ironic is that this one scenario that exacerbates the peak oil situation, is somewhat alleviated by it as well.  Peak oil drives the higher oil prices that allow the House of Saud to stay in power. Turchin's basis for oil prices in 2003 was around $30/ barrel; a price that we have been exceeding fairly regularly since then.

Oddly enough in the same time period, and apparently independently, a Robert Baer at the Atlantic, was writing about "The Fall of the House of Saud"- go figure.

What is even odder, is that in addition to outlining lots of political cronyism on the part of American politicians, he also outlines almost exactly the same scenario (too many princes) as Turchin.

From Robert Baer’s The Fall of the House of Saud

Americans have long considered Saudi Arabia the one constant in the Arab Middle East—a source of cheap oil, political stability, and lucrative business relationships. But the country is run by an increasingly dysfunctional royal family that has been funding militant Islamic movements abroad in an attempt to protect itself from them at home. A former CIA operative argues, in an article drawn from his new book, Sleeping With the Devil, that today's Saudi Arabia can't last much longer—and the social and economic fallout of its demise could be calamitous...

The House of Saud currently has some 30,000 members. The number will be 60,000 in a generation, maybe much higher. According to reliable sources, anecdotal evidence, and the Saudi gossip machine, the royal family is obsessed with gambling, alcohol, prostitution, and parties. And the commissions and other outlays to fund their vices are constant. What would the price of oil have to be in 2025 to support even the most basic privileges—for example, free air travel anywhere in the world on Saudi, the Saudi national airline—that the Saudi royals have come to enjoy? Once the family numbers 60,000, or 100,000, will there even be a spare seat for a mere commoner who wants to fly out of Riyadh or Jidda? Reformers among the royal family talk about cutting back the perks, but that's a hard package to sell.

Saudi Arabia operates the world's most advanced welfare state, a kind of anti-Marxian non-workers' paradise. Saudis get free health care and interest-free home and business loans. College education is free within the kingdom and heavily subsidized for those who study abroad. In one of the world's driest spots water is almost free. Electricity, domestic air travel, gasoline, and telephone service are available at far below cost. Many of the kingdom's best and brightest—the most well-educated and, in theory, the best prepared for the work world—have little motivation to do any work at all...

Not all the wishing in the world will change the basic reality of the situation.

* Saudi Arabia controls the largest share of the world's oil and serves as the market regulator for the global petroleum industry.

* No country consumes more oil, and is more dependent on Saudi oil, than the United States.

* The United States and the rest of the industrialized world are therefore absolutely dependent on Saudi Arabia's oil reserves, and will be for decades to come.

* If the Saudi oil spigot is shut off, by terrorism or by political revolution, the effect on the global economy, and particularly on the economy of the United States, will be devastating.

* Saudi oil is controlled by an increasingly bankrupt, criminal, dysfunctional, and out-of-touch royal family that is hated by the people it rules and by the nations that surround its kingdom.

Signs of impending disaster are everywhere, but the House of Saud has chosen to pray that the moment of reckoning will not come soon—and the United States has chosen to look away. So nothing changes: the royal family continues to exhaust the Saudi treasury, buying more and more arms and funneling more and more "charity" money to the jihadists, all in a desperate and self-destructive effort to protect itself.

A.D. 1000 At the Edge of the Apocalypse

10th Century Style Castle

The people in the year 999 were greatly concerned about the world coming to an end at the start of the new year.  Although Roman Empire in the East (which historian, but not contemporaries, referred to as the Byzantine Empire) was still around, the West had fallen low indeed.   If you use the tradition date of 476 A. D. for the fall or Rome, they had had 523 years to recover, and appear to have made little progress.

from Richard Erdoes, AD 1000: Living on the Brink of the Apocalypse, 1988 p 5-7.

The tenth century has been called the Century of Lead and iron.  The barbarian invasions were not yet finished; Europe was still besieged with horde after horde continuing to fling themselves against its walls.  Western Europe was beset on all sides by fanatic Saracens, Spanish Moors, Thor-worshipping Vikings, pagan Bulgars, and fierce Magyar horsemen-proverbial Scourges of God.  Christian barons slaughtered each other with a vengeance over a piece of land, killing their enemies’ serfs –men, women, and children to weaken them economically, burning villages and crops, and cutting down fruit trees for good measure.

In Rome rival popes imprisoned, starved, mutilated, castrated, blinded, and assassinated each other.  Sons murdered fathers, husbands killed wives, sisters fought brothers for possession of a castle or manor.   As early as 909  Archbishop of Rheims, lamented, ”The cities lie in ruins, the monasteries are burned or destroyed, the country far and wide reduced to a lifeless desert. Like first people of earth, men live without law and fear of punishment, abandoning themselves to their passions.  Were everyone does as he pleases, defying the laws divine and human, as well as the orders of their bishops.  The strong oppress the weak.  Everywhere  there is violence against the poor who are helpless to resist-and equally helpless the churches and cloisters who cannot defend what is theirs…

Violence, however, was not the only source of fear.  Recurrent famines added to the general misery. The result of the new invasions-as well as of feudal wars-was a terrible decline of agriculture…In certain years famine became general; it happened  at least five or six times during the century.  Starvation wandered ceaselessly from one region to another …

The famines…resulted in widespread cannibalism.  Parents ate their children.  Robbers not only waylaid hapless travelers, but also devoured them.  Glaber relates tales of hosts murdering their guests for their flesh.  He mentions parts of human bodies sold on markets and buried corpses being dug up and rousted.   He tells of starving people easting unclean beasts and creeping things.  A man who sold human flesh on the market of Tournus was strangled and burned.  Another wretch who dug up the man’s corpse and cooked it was burned at the stake.  A charcoal burner installed himself inside an abandoned church and murdered and ate persons who went there to pray.  A husband and wife who stopped there to ask for shelter surprised the cannibal, who was surrounded by forty-eight human heads while gnawing on the forty-ninth.  The pair managed to escape and report their grisly discovery.  The culprit was caught, smeared with pitch, and set aflame.  People found themselves reduced to eating earth.

Wars and famines were followed by epidemics. “At this time a horrible plague raged among men, namely a hidden fire which consumed and sloughed off all the limbs of the body it attacked.  A single night sufficed for this frightful evil to entirely devour its victims.”  This might very well have been the dreaded St. Anthony’s fire which, all during the Middle Ages, killed thousands of people. It was caused by Ergot, a fungus of the rye plant not easily detected by the naked eye. People eating bread made frome diseased ryw first experienced a tingling sensation, as if thousands of ants were crawling over their bare skin.  In severe cases, affected gingers and toes gangrened, turned black, and fell off. This was sometimes accompanied by respiratory failure, hallucinations, madness, and death.  For this and other diseases of the Middle Ages there were no remedies and not even a way of diagnosing the cause.  Medicine was still mainly a matter of magic, and treatments were determined by grotesque superstitions. Illness was usually looked upon as divine punishment or the effect of malevolent forces.

While some saw the approaching doom in signs and portents, others were convinced by Scripture, quoting Revelations:  “And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out and deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together to battle: the number of whom is as the sands of the sea.”

Many trembled at the prospect,, but others rejoiced in the knowledge that the Second Coming was near. The Empress Adelaide told Odilo, Abot of Cluny, ”As the thousandth year of our Lord’s becoming flesh approached, I yearn to behold this day, which knows no evening, in the forecourt of our Lord, I want to be dissolved in Christ.”



Tombs of Plague Victims from the Middle Ages

The Lost Neanderthal Empire

OK , the evidence that the Neanderthal’s organized themselves into complex social groups of any sort is rather  sparse: really sparse.  My primary point here is to show the fragility of small groups within limited geographical areas to large external events.

Even the gravity of weather events within the confines of a specific area are underestimated.  You do not need a Hurricane Katrina to cause a disaster within a limited area:  particularly if no aid is arriving from outside the area, and there is no possibility of fleeing to a safe haven area.

If modern means of transport are not available the ability to move large amounts of food stuff is very limited.  It should be recalled that even with the very well organized Romans, it was easier to ship something across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean Sea than to ship it by land 75 miles.  And yet at the same times, bodies of water and rivers are some of the primary culprits for localized weather disasters.

There seems to be a notion that if you got away from modern agriculture with its fuel dependence, and high population densities, that our problems would go away.   But it was weather related problems (the Younger Dryas to be more specific) that seem to be closely linked to the beginnings of the early farming economies.  Neanderthals would have been relatively unspecialized hunter-gatherers with a very low population density.   Yet, they were not immune to vagaries of nature.

For the first time, we have identified evidence that the disappearance of Neanderthals in the Caucasus coincides with a volcanic eruption at about 40,000 BP.

Our data support the hypothesis that the Middle to Upper Paleolithic transition in western Eurasia correlates with a global volcanogenic catastrophe. The coeval volcanic eruptions (from a large Campanian Ignimbrite eruption to a smaller eruption in the Central Caucasus) had an unusually sudden and devastating effect on the ecology and forced the fast and extreme climate deterioration (“volcanic winter”) of the Northern Hemisphere in the beginning of Heinrich Event 4. Given the data from Mezmaiskaya Cave and supporting evidence from other sites across the Europe, we guess that the Neanderthal lineage truncated abruptly after this catastrophe in most of its range.

We also propose that the most significant advantage of early modern humans over contemporary Neanderthals was geographic localization in the more southern parts of western Eurasia and Africa. Thus, modern humans avoided much of the direct impact of the European volcanic crisis. They may have further benefited from the Neanderthal population vacuum in Europe and major technological and social innovations, whose revolutionary appearance shortly after 40,000 BP documents the beginning of Upper Paleolithic.

Significance of Ecological Factors in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic Transition

Current Anthropology, 51:655–691, October 2010

Liubov Vitaliena Golovanova, Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev, Naomi Elansia Cleghorn, Marianna Alekseevna Koulkova, Tatiana Valentinovna Sapelko, and M. Steven Shackley

HT Overcoming Bias

Post Conquest Celebrations!

How Bad Was the Roman Collapse

Ian Morris in  Why the West Rules  notes that the Roman Empires per capita energy usage in the First Century was ~31,000 calories…it is very clear that Romans ate more meat, built  more cities, used more and bigger trading ships (and so on and so on) than Europeans would do again until the eighteenth century. P 157.

That is all very nice, but what exactly did this entail.

Ward-Perkins, Author of  The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization   continues:from

…the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in the western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of the saints resting in their churches. It was no mere transformation — it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’….

The reason the Romano-British economy collapsed so dramatically should give us pause for thought. Almost certainly the suddenness and the catastrophic scale of the crash were caused by the levels of sophistication and specialization reached by the economy in Roman times. The Romano-British population had grown used to buying their pottery, nails, and other basic goods from specialist producers, based often many miles away, and these producers in their turn relied on widespread markets to sustain their specialized production. When insecurity came in the fifth century, this impressive house of cards collapsed, leaving a population without the goods they wanted and without the skills and infrastructure needed to produce them locally. It took centuries to reconstruct networks of specialization and exchange comparable to those of the Roman period.

The more complex an economy is, the more fragile it is, and the more cataclysmic its disintegration can be. Our economy is, of course, in a different league of complexity to that of Roman Britain. Our pottery and metal goods are likely to have been made, not many miles away, but on the other side of the globe, while our main medium of exchange is electronic, and sometimes based on smoke and mirrors. If our economy ever truly collapses, the consequences will make fifth-century Britain seem like a picnic.

The economic indicators for fifth-century Britain are scanty, and derive exclusively from archeology, but they are consistent and extremely bleak. Under the Roman Empire, the province had benefited from the use of a sophisticated coinage in three metals – gold, silver and copper – lubricating the economy with a guaranteed and abundant medium of exchange. In the first decade of the fifth century new coins ceased to reach Britain from the imperial mints on the continent, and while some attempts were made to produce local substitutes, these efforts were soon abandoned. For about 300 years, from around AD 420, Britain’s economy functioned without coin.

Core manufacturing declined in a similar way. There was some continuity of production of the high-class metalwork needed by a warrior aristocracy to mark its wealth and status; but at the level of purely functional products there was startling change, all of it for the worse. Roman Britain had enjoyed an abundance of simple iron goods, documented by the many hob-nail boots and coffin-nails found in Roman cemeteries. These, like the coinage, disappeared early in the fifth century, as too did the industries that had produced abundant attractive and functional wheel-turned pottery. From the early fifth century, and for about 250 years, the potter’s wheel – that most basic tool, which enables thin-walled and smoothly finished vessels to be made in bulk – disappeared altogether from Britain. The only pots remaining were shaped by hand, and fired, not in kilns as in Roman times, but in open ‘clamps’ (a smart word for a pile of pots in a bonfire).

For two or three hundred years, beginning at the start of the fifth century, the economy of Britain reverted to levels not experienced since well before the Roman invasion of AD 43. The most startling features of the fifth-century crash are its suddenness and its scale. We might not be surprised if, on leaving the empire, Britain had reverted to an economy similar to that which it had enjoyed in the immediately pre-Roman Iron Age. But southern Britain just before the Roman invasion was a considerably more sophisticated place economically than Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries: it had a native silver coinage; pottery industries that produced wheel-turned vessels and sold them widely; and even the beginnings of settlements recognizable as towns. Nothing of the kind existed in the fifth and sixth centuries; and it was only really in the eighth century that the British economy crawled back to the levels it had already reached before Emperor Claudius’s invasion. It is impossible to say with any confidence when Britain finally returned to levels of economic complexity comparable to those of the highest point of Roman times, but it might be as late as around the year 1000 or 1100. If so, the post-Roman recession lasted for 600-700 years.

Call this a recession? At least it isn't a Dark Ages, Financial Times, Published: December 22 2009 20:36.

Switching to Chris Wickham in  The Inheritance of Rome (p151)

Britain faced economic meltdown in the early fifth century, after the withdrawal of Roman armies and the end of the Roman provincial administration around 410. ..Britain effectively fell off the Roma map…by 450 at the latest, villas were abandoned, urbanism had virtually ended, the countryside was partly abandoned around the old military focus of Hadrian’s Wall and all large-scale artisan production had ceased...

In noting that he  names this particular chapter: Kings without States: Britain and Ireland, 400-800 he states further:

Britain, at least, was divided among a set of small-scale rulers, sometimes called kings (reges), sometimes tyrants (tyranny).  A patchwork of tiny polities had replaced the Roman State.

It should be noted that Tainter, most apocalyptic favorite theoretician, is probably more wrong than right on this subject.  He notes that for many of the individuals involved, that the “collapse” may not have been such a bad thing.  In this, I believe he is misjudgingadvance of the Roman Empire.  He appears to be putting it in the same league as the many garden variety large Empires that spread over vast areas, built large armies, and great monuments.  But ice cores samples, confirmed by peat bod sampling show that airborne pollution increased sevenfold during the rise of the Roman Empire.  Europe (Rome) produced nine or ten times as much copper and silver in the firs century CE as in the thirteenth century CE, with all the energy demands that implies.  Not until 11^th century china did pollution levels rise back to the Roman level. Rome was different.

 Many people who write end-of-the-world scenarios tend to paint these Swiss Family Robinson with AK-47 scenarios.  Tribulations, and hard ships, but in the end a much more satisfying and wholesome world for the survivors:  and those other guys either were too fat and lazy, or where evil cannibal zombie strawmen.

If our society has a collapse comparable to Romes, we would not collapse to a 18th century technology, but more likely a 16th century one.  The 16th century had a lot of large empires, slavery, and starvation.  There were not a lot of areas where happy little homesteaders lived heart of the earth lives in bucolic farming communities tending to their crops unmolested.

Beirut School

 

Collapsed Empires: Zimbabwe

The Ruins of Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe was a large kingdom/empire that flourished for about 300 years from around 1100 to around 1450.  In terms of ancient kingdoms, this is not an extremely long period of time.  But the Sub-African urbanized areas had the misfortune of dealing with highly variable climate patterns.  While not always a "game killer" by themselves, timed to a peak demographic period already under stress and they could be.

CLIMATE CHANGE IN SOUTHERN AND EASTERN AFRICA
KARIN HOLMGREN and HELENA O¨ BERG

The fall of Mapungubwe was followed by the build-up of a new centre, the Great Zimbabwe, situated towards the east and along the southeast escarpment, where the amount of rain generally is more favourable. At first, Great Zimbabwe developed slowly, with later rapid growth coinciding with, and possibly favoured by, better climatic conditions. It survived one period of drought and then flourished, with a rapidly growing population, between 1400 and 1420 AD, a period of wetter, warmer conditions (Figure 2). The collapse of great Zimbabwe coincides with a rapid decline in precipitation and temperature at 1450 AD. Water shortage and famines, together with political instability and decline in trade, have been suggested as the causes for the abandonment of Great Zimbabwe (Parsons, 1993).

alternate link if the above one is buggy

Aftermaths: Pakistan - More Taxes.

Pakistan Flooding 2010

If you are a underwater (deeply in debt) country, or person for that matter.  The coming of disaster is not necessarily going to help you much.  Reneging on loans (bankruptcy) is really only a helpful alternative if you have a cash flow that will meet your needs going forward.  If you are short on cash flow before the disaster, you are not likely to much better off afterward.

Pakistan has limited options because in a country where the typical person earns about $1/day, it's budget deficit runs in excess of 5% of GDP and have 13% inflation even in "normal" times.   So they cannot afford to spurn creditors, and countries are cautious about lending money.

Traders oppose imposition of any new tax

By Moonis Ahmed

KARACHI: The business community has strongly opposed the government’s move to impose new taxes in the country in the wake of floods.

The businessmen said that this imposition of new flood tax would ultimately increase the inflation and would double the prices of commodities… criticizing the government for taking unwise and anti-nation decisions said that the nation was already heavily burdened due to various taxes, massive price hike, joblessness, frequent power tariff increases and dwindling exports. No further tax would be accepted by the people and the trade and industry, they added.

They said that the best and most practical option for the government is to seek writing off foreign loans to the tune of $46 billion as the country is not at all in any position of debt servicing due to massive catastrophe in which over 25 million people have been displaced after losing all their assets.

They further said that a loan of $450 million by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is a total failure of the government as it was a general loan and IMF gives it without any effort to any country in any circumstances (and neither] have given Pakistan any kind of favor or assistance at this hour of need and the government should dimly convey its position to both the institutions as well as Paris Club to write off loans immediately.

However, sources told Daily Times that the government has finalized its policy to impose some five percent flood surcharge to widen the tax net to provide relief to the flood affectees.  The government is facing a scarcity of funds in relief work, as international aid is also less than expected, they added.

Daily Times of Pakistan September 14, 2010. 

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.

---

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.