A non-coronavirus story!
This week I published a feature in Science’s special issue on drought about the rise and fall of Wari, which many archaeologists (though not all!) consider to be South America’s first empire. It focuses on a site in southern Peru called Cerro Baúl, where Wari established a colony based around ingenious water engineering. Throughout the Wari zone of influence, they built canals that were 20 times longer than anyone else and spread the use of agricultural terraces, a great way for getting the most out of limited water in the mountains. These innovations may be linked to the fact that the Andes were going through a dry period when Wari started expanding, or they might have been smart moves any time. Wari did violently invade some areas of Peru, but it seems they didn’t need to in Cerro Baúl—their hydraulic engineering allowed them to move into high, dry land no one else was particularly interested in and set up a successful colony that lasted for about 400 years, from 600 to 1000 C.E.
But despite all of Wari’s impressive water infrastructure, the state still collapsed during a severe drought. So…why? Clearly they knew how to manage aridity and even use it to their advantage. All of that knowledge and competence, however, meant a lot less once people stopped cooperating to implement it.
The story we usually hear about ancient societies and drought (or other kinds of catastrophes) is that drought inevitably leads to doom and collapse. Wari shows that potential catastrophes can lead to innovation when the state is strong, and disaster and disintegration when it isn’t. Drought/climate change/pandemic/[insert natural calamity] will only destroy your society if it’s already fraying. And even when drought does lead to collapse, that doesn’t mean that everybody died. It means they figured out new ways to live, maybe ones that they preferred.
This is the kind of collapse story I’ve always wanted to write, one that doesn’t make it sound like people are helpless in the face of environmental change or other challenges. The catastrophe is the backdrop. How people react, the decisions they make—that’s what shapes the story.