Drought Leads To War.

[Minimalist]

From the Nothing New Under The Sun Dept.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/05/ar...y-america/

After building a thriving society over centuries, one Native American society in the 12th century underwent a violent collapse that left the southwestern region of what is now the U.S. virtually depopulated.

According to a report from WSU, the years between 1140 and 1180 A.D. were the bloodiest per capita years on North American soil, with an astonishing nine of ten corpses exhumed from the era showing signs of death by traumatic injuries to the head and arms.

For about 50 years, Chaco culture dominated the region, but a massive drought in the mid-1100s caused Chaco society to collapse, sending shockwaves of violence out in all directions, followed by a steady mass exodus away from the region, leaving the once-mighty Pueblo cities largely abandoned and vulnerable to nomadic raiders.

[Cato]

Jared Diamond had a chapter devoted to the Anasazi in Collapse. It's been a few year since I read it, but as I recall Diamond stressed deforestation, soil mismanagement and the fact that they didn't produce anything and were entirely dependent on importation from surrounding cultures. These factors set-up the drought knock-out blow (El Nino driven???).

[Anomalocaris]

Amazing how starving to death is considered less palatable then killing.

[Minimalist]

When you ain't got nothin you got nothin to lose

Curiously, the Israelis can't seem to absorb this lesson vis a vis Gaza.

[Anomalocaris]

When you ain't got nothin you got nothin to lose

Curiously, the Israelis can't seem to absorb this lesson vis a vis Gaza.

If they haven't learned in 2000 years that there was never a god to have chosen them, then they wouldn't learn now they can't act as if there is a god and he did choose them.

[Minimalist]

True enough, Chuck. The idea that "god loves me" makes most people act like intolerable pricks.

[Jenny A]

It isn't drought so much as famine, whatever the famine's cause, that leads to violence. Hungary people have a tendency to get violent.

But the Anasazi in the 12th century reminded me a a controversy I've following for the last decade or so: did the Anasazi engage in cannibalism? Researchers Divided Over Whether Anasazi Were Cannibals?. The evidence for it is also from the 12th Century. The Anasazi descendents hotly deny it and suggest the evidence is really about the execution of witches. There's no doubt the Pueblo Indians haven't had a violent culture in a long long time. But I don't think anyone is looking at the evidence of 12th Century violence all that dispassionately.

I wish I still had access to the Denver Library, they ordered papers and books beyond the popular press, so we could read the actual scientific papers when the controversy began. Alas we no longer have access to a library anything like that.

[pocaracas]

It isn't drought so much as famine, whatever the famine's cause, that leads to violence. Hungary people have a tendency to get violent.

You have something against Hungarians? :p

[CapnAwesome]

Get ready for the great California civil war.

[bennyboy]

Get ready for the great California civil war.

Get ready for the Amerocanadian wars.