- Home
- Report n°5 : "Water : symbolism and culture"
Report n°5 : "Water : symbolism and culture"
-
Table of contents
- Annexes
- Drought, the destroyer of cultures
- Annexes
Drought, the destroyer of cultures
Without water, civilisations decline and die;even though the causes may be multiple in origin, as was so excellently demonstrated by Professor Jared Diamond of UCLA at a conference in Princeton in October 2002, water plays a key role in their disappearance, be it in Angkor, in the Indus valley, Easter Island or among the Maya. Professor Diamond has studied in minute detail the reasons for the extinction of the Anasazi Indian civilisation; the Anasazi once lived in Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico and their civilisation began to develop around 600 with the introduction of maize, Mexican squash and beans. The Anasazi were ingenious enough to survive in an environment of unpredictable rainfall and rather poor soil. They practised irrigated agriculture and the remains of impressive canals have been found.In Chaco Canyon and at Pueblo Benito, they demonstrated an ability to build six-storey "skyscrapers" big enough to contain up to six hundred rooms. Unfortunately, they destroyed their environment through excessive tree-felling. It is possible to track this process with great accuracy thanks either to radio-carbon dating or by dating the rings in the tree-trunks used as roof beams. They were forced to look farther and farther afield to meet their needs for building wood and firewood. Heavy rainfall gradually transformed their irrigation channels into arroyos(120) 10 metres deep, thereby ruling out irrigated agriculture, especially since no pumps existed at the time. Periods of drought followed, in 1040 then in 1090 and finally in 1117. Despite the prayers addressed to the gods in the village square or in the secrecy of the underground kiva, the rains failed to appear and the Anasazi civilisation disappeared. In explanation of this catastrophe, Jared Diamond writes:"Thanks to the tree-rings, to their width, and thanks to our understanding of environmental impacts, we know the precise rainfall for each year and we can thus deduce the severity of the drought".
On a more general note, Mark Maslin(121) of the Geography Department at University College London attributes the disappearance of many civilisations to climate change (the Helmand civilisation in Afghanistan, the Hongshan culture in China, etc.). In the case of Central America during the mediaeval cold period, Maslin asserts that a succession of droughts brought about the collapse of the Mayan civilisation in the classical age. The author believes that if the Maya had foreseen their vulnerability to long periods of water shortages and had introduced "new sources of water, new ways of storing it, and if they had drawn up a list of priorities for its use in periods of scarcity", they would probably have survived.
There is much food for thought here as regards our own current attitudes to water.
(120) A channel or gully that is normally dry but that intermittently becomes a torrent after rain, in tropical countries (Le Petit Larousse illustré, 100th edition, 2005).
(121) Mark Maslin, "Global warming", Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004.