Disturbing History - The Silence Of Empires

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Around 1200 BC, a king named Ammurapi dictated a letter from the port city of Ugarit describing seven enemy ships, burned towns, and an army that was somewhere else. That tablet was still sitting in the ruins more than 3,000 years later when a French archaeologist pulled it out of the ash. It's the only case in this entire episode where somebody put the emergency on the record while it was still happening.Everywhere else, the silence is the story. In this episode we work through the civilizations that flourished for 30 generations and then simply stopped, and we look at what the evidence actually shows rather than the version most of us got in school.We cover the Late Bronze Age collapse and the Sea Peoples, including the 3 consecutive drought years that Cornell researchers dated to roughly 1198 through 1196 BC using juniper tree rings, and the discovery that the Hittite capital at Hattusa was emptied of its archives and valuables before anyone set fire to it.We go to Minoan Crete, to the town at Akrotiri that was buried in ash with no bodies and no valuables left in it, and to the disputed sanctuary at Anemospilia, destroyed around 1700 BC, where 4 skeletons were found and no full excavation report was ever published. We take apart Mortimer Wheeler's massacre at Mohenjo-daro, which never happened, and look at what the weakening monsoon and the shifting rivers actually did to the Indus cities between about 2600 and 1900 BC.We spend real time on Rome. The denarius falling from roughly 98 percent silver under Augustus to a coin under 5 percent silver by the 260s AD, copper with a wash thin enough to rub off in your pocket. Something like 26 claimants to the throne in the 50 years between 235 and 284. The pottery, roof tiles, and coffins that vanish from the archaeological record across the western provinces. Odoacer shipping the imperial regalia to Constantinople in 476 while nobody alive treated it as an ending. And the year 536, when the sun went dim across three continents and stayed that way, followed by volcanic eruptions in 540 and 547 and a cold period that ran until about 660.Then the Maya, where we can read the dates carved on the monuments and watch the lights go out city by city, from the unfinished altar at Copán with two blank faces, commissioned in 822, to the last Long Count date anywhere, carved at Toniná in January of 909. Along the way, the royal court at Cancuén, 31 people found dismembered in a palace cistern around the year 800 with their jade still on them. Chaco Canyon, where a dynasty traced through mothers was buried in one room roughly 6 feet square for about 330 years.Cahokia, and the 53 young women laid out in two orderly rows inside Mound 72, all of them local. Angkor, where the people who ran the waterworks left a century before the waterworks failed. And Rapa Nui, where the collapse everybody has heard about did not happen, and the one that did was documented in writing by the people who carried it out, ending with a recorded population of 111 in 1877.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner. of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew.

And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place.

History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. Do you ever wonder what actually happened to the Maya or to the Roman Empire? Not the version you got in school, where somebody draws an arrow on a map and says the barbarians came. But what actually happened to the people and the cities in the whole working arrangement of daily life? Rome ran as an empire for roughly five centuries and as a republic for centuries before that. The Maya built cities in the jungle for the better part of a thousand years. Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Angkor, the Indus Valley. All of them lasted long enough that nobody alive inside them could remember a time before. And then they stop. Not conquered in an

afternoon, not wiped off the map, just gone, with people still walking around on the same ground and no longer doing any of the things that made the place what it was. That's the part I can't shake. A civilization can flourish for 30 generations and then simply cease to to exist. And in most of these cases, nobody living through it ever wrote down that it was happening. That's what we're looking at today. I want to start with the exception, because there's exactly one place in this whole story where somebody put the emergency on the record while it was still going on. Around 1,200 BC, a king named Amarapi dictated a letter to another king across the water. Amarapi ruled Ugarit, a port city on the Mediterranean coast of what's now northern Syria,

about seven miles north of modern Latakia. It was wealthy, and it was connected by trade and treaty to the Hittites in Anatolia, to Egypt, to Cyprus, to the Mycenaanian world across the Aegean. Scribes there wrote in several languages on clay tablets, and when the city burned, the clay baked hard and survived. Fire destroyed Ugarit and preserved its paperwork. The letters usually cited by its excavation number, and the translation most people quote comes from the French epigrapher Jean Nugairole.

Amarapi's writing to the king of Alascia, which is almost certainly Cyprus, and he addresses him as my father, which was diplomatic protocol between rulers of unequal rank rather than an actual family relationship. He says the enemy's ships arrived, that his towns were burned, that they did damage in his territory. He points out that his troops and chariots are away in the land, of Hadi, and his own ships are off the Luca coast. Seven ships, he says, and they've already hurt him badly. That letter gets oversold constantly, so let me be careful with it. The tablet was found at Ogarit. It never left. A lot of popular accounts take that to mean it was written and never sent, that it sat in the scribe's hand as the city fell around him. That's a good scene,

and it might even be true, but it isn't what the evidence establishes. Scribes kept copies. Drafts existed. A tablet sitting in the ruins of the city where it was composed could be an archival duplicate just as easily as an undelivered message. Claude Schaefer, who started excavating Ugarit in 1929, also reported that a group of these late tablets came out of an oven, as though they were being fired when the attack came. Later archaeologists who went back through the excavation records haven't been able to confirm that, and specialists treat the oven story, with real caution now. I'm not going to build anything on it, and neither should anybody else. What isn't in doubt is that Ugaret ended. The destruction dates to somewhere around 1190 to 1185 BC,

based on the pottery in the destruction layer, and how it correlates with the Aegean sequences. The city burned. It was never reoccupied. A kingdom with a written archive, a merchant fleet, and diplomatic correspondence with the great powers of the age, stopped existing, and the language its people spoke went out of the world with it. And Ugarat wasn't alone, which is what makes the late Bronze Age collapse different from an ordinary

sack. Across roughly a 50-year window on either side of 1,200 BC, the palace centers of the eastern Mediterranean came apart more or less together. Mycena and Greece lost its palaces, and with them the accounting system written in Linear B. So Greece went into a period with no writing at all for something like four centuries. Cities in Cyprus and along the Levantine coast burned. The Hittite Empire, which had gone toe to toe with Egypt at Kadesh a few generations earlier, dissolved. Egypt survived, but it shrank, and it never again projected power into the Levant the way it had. For a long time, the explanation was the sea peoples. That name comes from Egyptian sources. Mernepta, in the fifth year of his reign, around 1,27 BC,

recorded a coalition of foreign groups fighting alongside Libyans, and he named them, including the Equest, the Tresh, the Lucca, the Sheridan, and the Shekelesh. About 30 years later, Ramesses III had reliefs and inscriptions carved at Medinette Habu, describing a land battle and a sea battle in his eighth year, and there he names the Peliset, the Chekker, the Shekalesh, the Denian, and the Weheshesh. The Medinet Habu text is where the famous, image comes from, a mass of people moving with their families and their carts. No country able to stand against them. That inscription is an Egyptian pharaoh's victory monument, carved on the

wall of his own mortuary temple. Royal victory texts from the ancient near east are propaganda in the technical sense of the word. They exist to say that the king protected order against chaos. That doesn't make them false, but it does mean we're getting one government's account of an event, written for domestic consumption, with no corroborating account from the other side, because the other side didn't leave us anything, we can confidently attach to them. We don't know where the sea peoples came from. We don't know if they were a coordinated confederation or a label the Egyptians slapped on a lot of unrelated people showing up by boat over the course of decades.

Attempts to match those names to later populations, with Pellisette to Philistines being the most durable, have some archaeological support in the Philistine material culture of the Southern Levant. The others are much shakier. What's changed in the last 20 years is that the invasion stopped being the whole answer, and the climate evidence got specific enough to matter. In February of 2003, a team led by Sturt Manning at Cornell, published work in nature on juniper timbers, recovered from the Midas Mound at Gordion in central Turkey.

That mounds a burial stroke. later than the Hittites, but the trees used to build it were growing during the Hittite period, and their rings preserve a year-by-year record. Manning's team combined ring widths with carbon isotope ratios, which respond to how much moisture the tree could get. They found a general drying trend from the later 13th into the 12th century BC, and inside that trend, three consecutive years of severe drought, dated to roughly 1198 through 1196 BC.

give or take three years. Those three years fall in the driest 6% of a record spanning more than seven centuries. Three bad years in a row is a different problem than one bad year. John Marston, one of the co-authors, made the point that a farming society in that region kept enough stored grain to survive a single failure. Three failures in sequence empties the granaries, and once the granaries are empty, the tax base goes with them. And once the tax base goes, the state can't pay the army, it needs to hold the territory that produces the tax. Eric Klein, who wrote the best-known book on this period, has said the drought fits neatly inside the general picture, rather than replacing it. The drought isn't the killer by itself.

It's the thing that makes every other pressure impossible to absorb. There's a piece of this from Hattusa, the Hittite capital in north central Turkey, that changed how I think about the whole subject. For most of the 20th century the story was that the capital got stormed and burned by invaders which fit the sea people's narrative perfectly. Then the German excavations directed for years by Yergen Seer produced a different picture. The city does show burning but the temples and palaces had been emptied first. The valuables were gone. The archives were gone. The evidence points to Hatusa being largely abandoned in an organized way over some period of

time before anybody set fire to it. Whoever burned Hytusa burned a place that had already been cleaned out and mostly vacated. A capital city that gets sacked is a tragedy. A capital city whose government packs up the tablets and the treasury and leaves while everybody else stays behind to scavenge through what's left is a decision. Somebody in the Hittite administration looked at the situation and concluded the center couldn't be held and they moved. We don't know where they went. Successor kingdoms in southeastern Turkey and northern Syria carried on using Hittite hieroglyphic script and Hittite royal names for centuries. So some continuity clearly existed, but the thread from Hattusa to those places is inference, not documentation. So what disappeared exactly?

Not the people of Anatolia or the Aegean or the Levant. Those regions were continuously inhabited. What disappeared was a particular kind of arrangement. palace economies that ran on centralized redistribution, that depended on long-distance trade and tin and copper to make bronze, that maintained scribal bureaucracies and royal correspondence. When the network broke, the parts of the system that only made sense as part of a network stopped making sense. Literacy went first in Greece, because Linear B existed almost entirely to track palace inventories, and once the palaces were gone, there wasn't anything left for it to count.

700 miles west of Ugarit on Crete, there's a different collapse that people have spent a century trying to blame on a volcano. The Minoan civilization built palace complexes at Nassus, Faistos, Malia, and Zachros, starting around 2000 BC. They wrote in a script we call Linear A, which is still undeciphered, and they left frescoes of bull leaping and processions in marine life that don't look like anything else in the Bronze Age Mediterranean. They were traitors. Minoan-style wall paintings have turned up in Egypt and in the Levant, so their reach was real. Around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, the volcanic island of Thera, modern Santorini, about 70 miles north of Crete, erupted.

It was one of the largest volcanic events of the last 10,000 years. It blew out the center of the island and left the caldera you can sail into today. On Thera itself, the Bronze Age town at Akrateri was buried in ash and pumice, and because of that burial, it's preserved to a degree that has no parallel in the Aegean. Multi-story buildings. Fresco's still on the walls. Furniture whose shape survives as voids in the ash. What Akritiri doesn't have is bodies. Excavators have found essentially no human remains in the buried town, and very few valuables.

There's also evidence of an... earthquake and of repair work before the ash fell, an evidence of a gap between the first phase of the eruption and the catastrophic phase. The straightforward reading, and the one most archaeologists accept, is that the people of Akrateri got warning, understood what it meant, and left. Where they went, nobody knows. No cemetery of Akritiri refugees has ever been identified anywhere. The eruption of Thera didn't destroy Manoan Crete. It couldn't have on the timeline. Crete's far enough away that the ashfall was modest,

and the palace at Nassus kept functioning for something on the order of a century and a half afterward. The destructions that actually end the Minoan palatial system come later, in the phase archaeologists call late Minoan 1B, and they're burning destructions across the island. Nassus is still running after that, but the administrative tablets there are written in Linear B, which records an early form of Greek. That's a Mycenaean administration

operating out of a Minoan palace. The date of the eruption is one of the genuinely unresolved fights in Mediterranean archaeology, and it's worth understanding why. Radiocarbon dates on grain and legumes buried under the eruption deposits and on an olive branch buried within them. Cluster in the late 17th century BC.

One well-known study, Wiggle-matched that olive branch to a range of 16th, 1727 to 1600 BC. Archaeologists working from Egyptian synchronisms, meaning Egyptian objects found in datable Aegean context and the reverse, have argued for something in the range of 1570 to 1500. Underneath all of it is a plateau in the radiocarbon calibration curve,

running roughly from 1620 to 1540 BC, and a plateau means a single measurement can't give you a precise calendar date. because any year inside it fits the same reading. Charlotte Pearson and colleagues published tree ring work in 2018 that pushed the radio carbon range later to somewhere between 1,600 and 1525, which overlaps the archaeological estimate for the first time. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

A 2023 study of an olive shrub from neighboring Therasia argued for the middle of the 16th century, and Manning has published a reanalysis arguing for the late 17th to early 16th. The gap has narrowed and the argument hasn't closed. Anybody who tells you confidently that Thera erupted in a specific year is picking aside in a fight that's still live. Harder to look away from is a small building at Anamospelia on the slopes of Mount Juktus near Arcanus. Effie Sapuna Sakhalaaki spotted the site during survey

and she and her husband Janus Sakela Rakis excavated it over roughly a month in 1979. The building was destroyed by earthquake and fire around 1700 BC, which is about the same time the first Minoan palaces were destroyed. So this is early, several centuries before anything else on Crete I've described. Inside, they found four human skeletons. One was a young man, roughly 18 years old, on a raised platform, in a contracted position with a long bronze blade lying across him. The blade had an animal head incised on each side.

The excavators reported that the bones on one side of his body were a different color than the other, which they read as evidence that blood had drained out of him before he died. Nearby were an older man and a woman. A fourth individual lay in the corridor, and the position of that skeleton suggested somebody running for the door when the roof came down. The Saccharacus concluded this was a human sacrifice in progress, interrupted by the earthquake that killed the efficients along with the victim.

And they proposed the sacrifice was an attempt to stop the earthquakes that had been hitting the island. That interpretation has been challenged from the start. Dennis Hughes, who wrote a book on human sacrifice in ancient Greece, argues that the blade looks more like an ornate spearhead than a knife and could have fallen onto the body from shelving above. that there's no real evidence the platform was an altar, and that there's no clear evidence the young man was bound. The bone discoloration argument isn't something you'd want to hang a conclusion on today, and there's a documentation problem underneath all of it. A full official excavation report was never published.

For decades, the most detailed public account of the find was a National Geographic article the excavators wrote in 1981. That's not a knock on them personally. but it means the wider field has never been able to check the primary record the way it normally would. Separately, Peter Warren, excavating a building at Nassus, found the bones of at least two children mixed with animal bones and showing cut marks he compared to butchery. Warren argued for ritual killing, possibly with a cannibalistic element.

Other researchers have proposed secondary burial practices involving defleshing of the dead, which is documented in plenty of other cultures and leave similar marks. Both sites keep getting cited as proof that the Minoans were secretly monstrous underneath the Dolphin Frescos. Two disputed deposits don't characterize a civilization that lasted 600 years, especially when one of them was never fully published. Go back further and much further east to the largest Bronze Age civilization by area and the one we understand least.

The Indus civilization, sometimes called Harapan after the first site excavated, covered something on the order of a million square kilometers across what's now Pakistan and northwestern India. Its mature phase runs roughly from 2,600 to 1900 BC. The major cities include Mohenjo Daro and Harappa in Pakistan, and Dolavira and Rakagari in India. The urban planning is what everybody notices first, streets on a grid, baked brick and standardized proportions, covered drains running under the streets with access points for cleaning,

bathing platforms in ordinary houses, wells, a public water tank at Mohanjo Daro that we call the Great Bath because we don't know what they called it, or precisely what it was for. The strangest thing about these cities is what they don't have. There aren't any obvious palaces, no royal tombs stuffed with grave goods, no temples that everybody agrees are temples. No monuments showing a ruler receiving tribute or standing over defeated enemies.

No mass graves of war dead. Very few weapons compared to any contemporary society. Every other early urban civilization we know about, in Mesopotamia, in Egypt, in China, in Mesoamerica, advertises its rulers loudly and permanently. The Indus cities don't. Whatever held them together, They didn't commemorate it the way everybody else did.

And we can't read their writing. The Indus script survives on seals, tablets, pottery, and copper plates in roughly 400 distinct signs. The inscriptions are short, averaging around five signs, with the longest known text running to only a couple dozen. There's no bilingual text, no Rosetta equivalent. There have been hundreds of claimed decipherments, and not one has been accepted. There's even a serious minority argument made most prominently by Steve Farmer, Richard Sprote, and Michael Wittsell, that the sign system isn't writing at all in the sense of encoding speech, but a non-linguistic symbol system. Most Indus specialists disagree with them.

The dispute hasn't settled because the same problem defeats both sides. The texts are too short, and there aren't enough of them. So when the cities decline, we don't have an account from anybody who was there. That vacuum got filled in the middle of the 20th century with a story about a massacre. Excavators at Mohanjodaro in the 1920s and 30s turned up scattered human remains in various parts of the city. In one lane, a group of six. In another area, nine individuals, several of them children, in what looked like a hasty pit, in a room in one of the excavated blocks, more than a dozen.

Mortimer Wheeler, who worked at the site in the 1940s, pulled these together and argued they were the last defenders of the city, killed where they fell when Indo-Aryan invaders overran it. He tied it to the Rig Veda and to Indra. The god described there as a breaker of forts, and he wrote a line that's followed the subject around ever since, that on circumstantial evidence, Indra stands accused. It's a great line. It's also wrong, and the way it fell apart is a useful, lesson in how archaeology corrects itself. George Dales, who excavated at Mohenjo Daro later,

wrote a paper with the blunt title of the mythical massacre at Mohenjo Daro, and he asked the obvious questions. Where are the burned fortresses? Where are the arrowheads and the weapons and the armor? Where are the bodies of the invaders? After extensive excavation, none of them were ever found. There's no destruction layer over the final period of the city. Then in 1980s, the biological anthropologist Kenneth Kennedy and his colleagues went back to the skeletal collection itself and found no evidence of violent death. The breakage patterns looked post-mortem. Worse for Wheeler's theory, the remains don't all come from the same moment. They're from different levels and different periods, and some appear to post-date the city's occupation entirely.

Dale suggested at least some of them might be people who died, in an already abandoned ruin. So the massacre never happened. What did happen is harder to narrate, because it happened slowly. The paleo-climate evidence points to a weakening of the summer monsoon in South Asia in the centuries after 2,200 BC. Part of the broad drying episode sometimes called the 4.2 kilo-year event, work published by Liviu Giosin and colleagues in 2012, using sediment and landscape analysis, argued that Indus settlement patterns track river behavior closely. and that as the monsoon weakened, the floodplain agriculture feeding the cities got less reliable. There's also the river problem, and a lot of nonsense has been written about it.

Many Harapan sites cluster along a now-dry channel in northwestern India, the Gagar Hakra, which some people identify with the Sarasvadi of later Indian texts. The popular version is that a great glacier-fed river dried up and doomed the cities on its banks. Work by Peter Clift, Sanjeev Gupta, Rajiv Sinha, and others has complicated that considerably. Their evidence indicates the Suitledge, a Himalayan river, had already shifted away from that channel long before Harapan urbanism, and that the Gagar-Hakra in Harapan times was a monsoon-fed seasonal river rather than a glacier-fed permanent one. Their argument is almost the reverse of the popular story. People settled there because a seasonal river was predictable and didn't flood cattle.

astrophically. And when the monsoon weakened, that predictability was exactly what they lost. The decline on the ground isn't a burning or an invasion. It's cities getting smaller and messier. Drains stop being maintained. The standardization in weights and bricks that defines the mature phase breaks down. The distinctive seals stop being made. Long distance trade with Mesopotamia falls off, and the Mesopotamian references to Meluha, which most scholars think means the endus region dry up. Settlement shifts east and south into smaller villages. In some regions there are actually more sites in the late period than in the mature period, just far smaller ones. That is extinction. That's an urban civilization giving up on being urban. The human evidence from the

end of the sequence isn't gentle. Gwen Robbins, Shug, and colleagues working on skeletal collections from Harappa published research indicating increases in infectious disease, including cases interpreted as leprosy and tuberculosis, and increases in cranial injuries during the later phases, with the injuries and the disease distributed unevenly across the burial areas. Their reading is that as the system frayed, the burden didn't fall equally, and some people in that society absorbed a great deal more of it than others. That's a limited skeletal sample from one site, and it shouldn't be stretched into a portrait of an entire civilization,

but it's a real signal from the actual bones of people, who live through the end. The Rakagari genome comes up every time this subject does. In 2019, a team led by Vassant Shinda published a genome from an individual buried at Rakagari, a major Harap and site in Haryana. That individual showed no step pastoralist ancestry, which is the genetic signature associated with the later spread of Indo-European languages. It's a single genome, and one genome can't describe a population. But taken together, with the wider ancient DNA work on South Asia. It supports what the archaeology already indicated. Whatever ended the Indus cities, an Aryan invasion isn't the mechanism, and Wheeler's accusation

against Indra should have been withdrawn a long time ago. Now come forward 2,000 years, to the one everybody names first. In September of the year 476, a Germanic officer named Odoachar deposed the emperor in Ravenna, a teenager named Romulus Augustulus, and then, did something that nobody had done before. He didn't install a replacement. He gathered up the Western Imperial Regalia and shipped it east to Constantinople to the Emperor Zeno, with the message that the West didn't need an emperor of its own anymore. One empire, one emperor, and he'd run Italy on Zeno's behalf. That's the date in the textbooks. 476, the fall of Rome. And here's what I find hard to get past. Nobody at the time treated it as the end of anything.

There's no contemporary account describing the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Senate kept meeting. Roman law kept operating. Consuls kept being appointed. People went right on calling themselves Romans. And the eastern half of the empire ruled from Constantinople, continued for another thousand years, until 1453. The idea that 476 is the end is a piece of bookkeeping done centuries later

by historians who needed a line on a page. So if the empire didn't end with a bang in 476, when did it end? And how would you even know? The most honest answer I found is that you can measure it in the things people used every day. Start with the money, because the Romans left us millions of coins and you can put them under a microscope. Under Augustus, the denarius was a coin of roughly four grams at about 95 to 98% silver. Nero trimmed the weight and the purity. Trajan and Hadrian trimmed it further.

By the end of the second century, it was down around 56%. Then in 215, Caracalla introduced a new coin, the Antoninianus, that was tariffed at two dinariah, but only carried about one and a half times the silver. It was a debasement dressed up as a denomination. By the 260s under Galeenus, the Antoninianus had fallen to under 5% silver, and some examples come in around 2.5%. What that means physically is that the coin was copper with a thin silver wash applied at striking, and the wash wore off in circulation.

People were handing each other coins that turned brown in their pockets. That's a government lying about its own money in a way that any farmer at a market could see with his own eyes, and it ran for decades. The debasement tracks the crisis of the third century, roughly 235 to 284, when something like 26 men claimed the throne in 50 years, which averages out to a new emperor every couple of years, most of them killed by their own soldiers or by a rival. Emperors needed to pay armies to stay alive,

and paying armies meant minting more coins, and minting more coins with less silver in each meant inflation, and inflation meant needing to mint more still. Layered on top of that was disease. The Antonine plague hit the empire between about 165, and 180, and the physician Galen described it firsthand, though the pathogen still isn't identified with certainty, and smallpox is the usual guess. The plague of Cyprian ran from around 249 to 262, and in 541 the Justinianic plague arrived, which is the first documented pandemic of the organism

that would later cause the black death. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. There's a strange proxy for all this locked in Greenland ice. Roman silver came out of lead ores, mostly in Spain and Britain, and smelting it put lead into the atmosphere, and that lead settled onto ice sheets and stayed there in datable layers. Researchers led by Joseph McConnell published work in 2018 reading that record, and the lead signal rises through the late Republic and early empire peaks and then drops off sharply around the time of the Antonine plague and doesn't come back to those levels for a very long time. You can read the size of the Roman economy and the pollution it left in the Arctic. Then the 5th century. In 410, Alaric and the Visigoths sacked the city of

Rome itself, the first time in 800 years a foreign army had taken it. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, said the city that had captured the whole world had itself been captured. The vandal sacked it again in 4.55, and through all of that, the machinery of the Western Empire was losing the ability to do the things an empire does, which brings us to the pottery. Brian Ward Perkins, an archaeologist at Oxford, wrote the book that changed how I think about this, and his argument runs on unglamorous objects. Under Rome, ordinary people across the western provinces used mass-produced, wheel-thrown pottery of high quality, shipped in bulk from production centers hundreds of miles away. Kitchenware, tablewares, amphorae for oil and wine. Not luxury goods, just the pots a normal household owned. Roofs had fired tiles.

Buildings used iron nails. Coins circulated down to small denominations, which is how you know ordinary people were buying and selling. rather than bartering. All of that comes apart, and in Britain, it comes apart almost completely. The coin supply from the Imperial Mints stops in the early 5th century. The wheel-throne pottery industry vanishes. What replaces it is hand-shaped, poorly fired, and so fragile that it breaks apart with use. Tiled roofs stop being made. Iron nails get scarce. In many regions, people stopped burying their dead in coffins and used a cloth shroud instead. Ward Perkins argues that the material standard of living in post-Roman Britain fell below what it had been in the Iron Age, before the

Romans ever arrived, and it took centuries to climb back. That claims contested, and I want to be fair about it. There's a whole school of scholarship associated with Peter Brown and later with Walter Gaufort and Guy Hallsaw that reads this period as transformation rather than catastrophe, with Germanic groups accommodated into Roman structures rather than smashing them, and with real cultural and religious creativity in the centuries that follow. Ward Perkins and Peter Heather push back hard, and Ward Perkins in particular argues that whatever you call it, somebody who used to eat off a decent plate,

was now eating off something that fell apart, and that's a fact about a real person's life, not a matter of interpretation. I lean toward Ward Perkins on the material evidence, and I think the transformation school is right that nobody woke up in the year 500 and declared civilization over. Both things can be true. And then, right at the end of this, comes a year I'd never heard of until a few years ago. In 536, the sun went dim.

Procopius writing from Constantinople recorded that the sun gave its light without brightness for the whole year, like a permanent eclipse. Cassiodorus, in Italy, described a sun with a sun with, with weakened rays in a bluish color, a winter without storms, a spring without mildness, a summer without heat. John of Ephesus described the same thing from Syria. Michael the Syrian, writing much later from earlier sources,

said the sun shone feebly for about a year and a half. There were summer snows in China. For centuries nobody knew what caused it. Then Ice Corps work published by Michael Seigle and colleagues in 2015 identified a cluster of major volcanic eruptions in 536, 540, and 547. Wolf Bunkin and colleagues followed in 2016 with tree ring evidence tying that cluster, along with a dip in solar activity, to a cold period across the northern hemisphere that ran

until roughly 660. They named it the late antique little ice age. It's the coldest stretch of the last 2,000 years, and in the middle of it, in 541, the plague arrived. So the story of what happened to Rome isn't one story. It's currency debasement over three centuries. Political instability so severe that emperors averaged two years, two documented pandemics before the sixth century, and a third during it.

An economy visible in Arctic ice that never recovers its second century peak. A collapse in ordinary manufactured goods across an entire half of the empire. And a volcanic climate shock at the end of it that put the northern hemisphere in a hundred 120-year cold snap. What there isn't, anywhere in that pile, is a document from anybody saying this is the end. Amarapi wrote a letter. Rome didn't. The largest and best documented state in the ancient Western world went out without a single

person on record noticing they were living through it. That brings us to the Maya and to the misconception that has to go first. The Maya didn't vanish. There are several million Maya people alive today. speaking around 30 Mayan languages across Guatemala, Mexico, Belize, and Honduras. What collapsed in the southern lowlands, between roughly 750 and 900 of the common era, was a specific political and religious system. Divine Kingship, the great cities of the interior,

the practice of erecting carved monuments with long-count dates recording royal history. That last one gives us something almost no other ancient collapse provides, The Maya dated their monuments precisely, and we can read those dates. So we can watch the lights go out city by city. At Capon in western Honduras, a king named Okit-Took took the throne in February of the year 822. He commissioned a monument called Altar El, meant to be done in the style of the great dynastic altar his predecessors had made, the one showing 16 rulers in succession. Alter L was never finished.

one face shows his enthronement. A second face was started. The other two are blank. That's the last carved date at Copan, an unfinished advertisement for a rain that apparently didn't have the labor or the time behind it to be completed. The final long-count date known anywhere is on Monument 101 at Tonina, in Chiapas, and it corresponds to January of the year 909. After that, for the southern lowlands, nothing.

Not a scaled-down version of the practice. The practice stops. The archaeology from the decades before that is worse than a simple abandonment. In the Pitec-Spatun region of Guatemala, Arthur Demarest and his teams documented what happened at Dos Peles, a city that had risen fast on the back of warfare. After a defeat around the year 761, the people still there built a defensive wall straight through the ceremonial plaza.

They quarried the stone for it out of their own, temples and their own royal buildings. Later on, people were living in the ball court. A city built to display sacred power got taken apart and reassembled into a fortification by the people still standing in it. At Agueteca, not far away, Takeshi Inamata excavated a royal complex where the residents put up defensive walls running for something like three kilometers around the elite center, built around 790 to 810. The walls didn't work. The complex burned, around 810 and what makes the site extraordinary is that the residents didn't have time to clear it out the floors were covered with objects left in place tools and ornaments and

vessels and scribal equipment sitting exactly where they'd been when the attack came that's rare most sites get abandoned in an orderly way and stripped of anything useful on the way out then there's concuwen at the headwaters of the passion river in 2005 demarest's project, working with Guatemalan archaeologist Thomas Barientos and Sylvia Alvarado, was tracing the site's water system when they hit bone in a ceremonial cistern near the palace. Underneath the mud, they found the remains of 31 people, men, women, and children, including two women who were pregnant. The forensic work was directed by Fridi Petcarelli and Jose Suas Navar of the Guatemalan Forensic

Anthropology Foundation. Many of the dead had been killed by spear thrust to the throat, and bodies had been dismembered before they went into the cistern, along with their jewelry, their headdresses, and their jade. About 80 yards away in a shallow grave, they found a man and a woman identified as the king Khan-Mox and his queen, with the identification resting on a necklace carrying his name and title. North of the palace, they found roughly a dozen more high-status individuals.

Around the site were half-built palisade wall, walls, unfinished, and scattered spearheads. The city had seen it coming and had started building defenses it never got to finish. The dates around the year 800. What strikes me as a former investigator isn't the violence, which is common enough in the archaeological record. It's the specificity. The attackers didn't just overrun a city and loot it. They killed the entire royal court, women and children included. They left the jade and the jaguar fang necklaces on the bodies, They put the dead in the sacred water feature of the palace, and then they went away and never occupied the place.

Nobody moved in. Nobody rebuilt. Whoever did this wasn't conquering Canquan. They were ending it, and we don't know who they were. Against all that, the climate data. David Hodel and colleagues started publishing on Lake Chechankanab in the Yucatan back in the 1990s, showing drought signals that lined up with the Terminal Classic. In 2012, Douglas Kennett and co-authors published a stalagmite record from Yak-Balem Cave in Belize with annual resolution

and correlated the drying trend with the timing of warfare and political disintegration recorded in the inscriptions themselves. Then in 2018, Nicholas Evans and colleagues published a study in science, using a method I think is genuinely clever. When a lake evaporates down, gypsum crystallizes out of the water, and the water model locked inside those crystals preserve the isotopic signature of the lake water at that moment. Measuring those isotopes gets you much closer to measuring the ancient water directly than any proxy before it. Their model concluded that annual rainfall in that region fell by somewhere between 41 and 54 percent during the collapse period, with intervals of up to 70 percent reduction, at the worst of it. Cut the rain roughly in half in a region where cities depended on

stored rainwater in reservoirs and on rain-fed agriculture, and you don't need a mystery. But drought alone doesn't explain why the northern lowlands at Chechenetza and Uxmall and the Pook cities kept going and in some cases flourished while the South emptied out. It doesn't explain why some cities collapsed generations before others in the same rainfall regime. The picture that holds up is one where droughts the pressure and the political systems the fault line. Maya kingship was built on the ruler's ability to intercede with the gods and deliver rain and abundance. A king in a system like that doesn't have any good options during a multi-decade drought.

Failure isn't a policy problem for him. It's a theological one. And people voted with their feet. The southern lowland population didn't die in place. It drained north and it drained toward the coasts over decades. What ended was the arrangement where a divine lord. Lord in a jungle city could command the labor of thousands of farmers to build monuments proclaiming his relationship with the gods.

Roughly the same century, about 1,700 miles northwest, in a desert canyon in what's now northwestern New Mexico, people were doing something that still doesn't make ordinary sense. Chaco Canyon isn't a comfortable place. It's high desert, cold and winter, short on water, marginal for farming. Between about 850 and 1150 of the common era, the ancestral Pueblo and people built there anyway, and what they built is on a scale nothing else in that region approaches. Pueblo Bonito, the largest of the great houses, rose to multiple stories, with something in the range of 650 rooms across more than four acres.

The masonry's precise, with core and veneer walls faced in banded stonework. Great Kivas, the large circular ceremonial chival. chambers are sunk into the plazas. Buildings are aligned to solar and lunar events, including the extreme positions of the moon, on a cycle that takes about 18 and a half years. And you can't identify a cycle like that without generations of somebody watching and remembering. Roads run out from the canyon in straight lines, 30 feet wide in places, cut with stairways where they meet cliffs, running for miles across country that doesn't require a road. There weren't any wheeled vehicles and there weren't draft animals. The roads aren't there for hauling efficiency. Then the timber. Estimates for the

number of trees that went into Chacoan construction run from more than 200,000 up to more than 240,000. Strantium isotope work, published by Nathan English and colleagues in 2001, traced great house beams to the Chuska Mountains and the San Mateo Mountains, 75 to 100 kilometers away. Call it 50 to 60 miles. Later, tree ring work by Christopher Goiterman and colleagues added the Zuni Mountains as a third source and found that roughly 70% of the timbers came from more than 75 kilometers out. The beams don't show drag marks. People carried them. They were connected to a much wider world than anybody assumed a few decades ago. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. In 2009, Patricia Crown and Jeffrey Hurst tested residue from cylinder jars found at Pueblo Bonito

and detected theobramine, the marker compound for cacao. Cacao doesn't grow anywhere near New Mexico. The nearest source is more than a thousand miles south in Mesoamerica. They also imported scarlet macaws, tropical birds that had to be transported alive across that same distance. Then there's room 33 at Pueblo Bonito, about six and a half feet square, with a an odd hatch-like entry high in the wall. Fourteen people were buried in it. The earliest, cataloged as burial 14, was a man in his 40s who died from a lethal blow to the

head. He was laid on a prepared floor of sand and wood ash with more than 11,000 turquoise beads and pendants and more than 3,000 shell ones, along with abalone shells from the Pacific coast and a conch shell trumpet. It's the richest burial ever found in the American Southwest. and the room appears to have been purpose-built as is crypt. In 2017, a team including Douglas Kennett, Stephen Plog and George Perry published mitochondrial genome data

from nine of the individuals in that room and found they all shared the same maternal lineage across a span of roughly 330 years. That's a dynasty, traced through mothers, buried in one small room for over three centuries. It ends inside a single lifetime. Tree ring records from the region show a severe drought starting around 1130 and running some 50 years. Construction at Chaco slows and then stops.

Rooms in the great houses were sealed. Some kivas were deliberately burned and closed in what looked like formal ritual terminations rather than attacks. People left the canyon. They went north into the Mesa Verde region, mostly, and for a while it worked. then, in the middle of the 1200s, the same thing happened again, but harder. Another long drought, in the 1270s and 80s. And this time, the archaeological record fills up with violence. A Castle Rock Pueblo in southwestern Colorado,

worked by Kristen Cuckleman and her colleagues documented dozens of individuals with perimortem injuries, killed at the site around the year 1280 and left unburied. San Canyon Pueblo nearby tells a similar story. These aren't skirmishes. Their village is destroyed with their people still in them. And then there's Cowboy Wash. It's contested ground, and it involves the ancestors of living people who've said clearly

that they object to how it's been used. Cowboy Wash is a group of small sites on the southern slopes of Sleeping Ute Mountain in southwestern Colorado, excavated in the 1990s ahead of a construction project. At one of them, cataloged as 5MT-101010, dating to around 1150. Archaeologists found the remains of seven individuals on the floors of two pit houses. The bones were disarticulated.

They showed cut marks consistent with butchery, breakage consistent with marrow extraction, burning and polish on the ends, consistent with having been stirred in a cooking pot. Household goods and roofing materials were still in place, which isn't what abandonment normally looks like. Then Richard Marlar, a molecular biologist at the University of Colorado, ran immunological tests, and in the year 2000, the team published in nature.

They reported human myoglobin, a protein found in muscle tissue, in residue from a cooking vessel at the site, and in a human coprolite recovered from a cooled hearth. Control samples from other sites and from modern feces didn't show it. Their conclusion was that somebody at that site ate human flesh and then defecated in the fireplace of the house before leaving. The critique came fast, and it was serious. Kurt Dengoska, Deborah Martin, and Thomas Yellow Horse Dengaska published a response in American antiquity, questioning the reliability of protein residue analysis on archaeological material and arguing the interpretation, outran the evidence.

Pueblo and scholars and tribal cultural officials objected to a wider pattern in this literature, particularly to Christy Turner's book Mancorn, published in 1990. which catalogued dozens of assemblages across the southwest as cannibalism and proposed the practice had been introduced by Mesoamerican intruders. That Mesoamerican thesis hasn't held up, and most southwestern archaeologists reject it now. The original Cowboy Wash team, joined by additional analysts, published a response defending their methods. The physical evidence at Cowboy Wash for human bodies being processed, the way you'd process a food animal is strong. The biochemical evidence for consumption is suggestive, but leans on a technique whose reliability on ancient samples was disputed then and is disputed now. And what the behavior meant is a

separate question that the bones can't answer at all. Starvation cannibalism during a famine. The ritual execution of people accused of witchcraft, which is documented ethnographically in the Southwest, and which J. Andrew Darling and others have proposed, and terror violence intended to break a community all produce broadly similar assemblages. Brian Billman, who directed the work, has argued for social breakdown under drought conditions. Nobody can currently distinguish between those explanations from the evidence in hand, and I'd treat anyone who says otherwise with suspicion. What isn't disputed is what happened next.

By about 1,300, the entire Four Corners region, tens of thousands of square miles that had supported ancestral Pueblo and farming communities for centuries, was empty. not thinned out, empty. Those people moved south and east to the Rio Grande Valley and the Hopi Mesa's and Zuni, where their descendants live today and can tell you about it. The migration isn't a mystery to them. It's mainly a mystery to the people who came later and dug up the houses. At almost the same time, on the floodplain of the Mississippi River,

across from where St. Louis stands now, the largest city north of Mexico was going through its own version of the same thing. Cahokohia went to. up fast. Archaeologists talk about a big bang around the year 1050 when the settlement reorganized on an enormous new plan inside a very short span. At its height, the central precinct held something like 10 to 20,000 people, with more in the surrounding settlements, which makes it larger than London at the same date. The builders raised more than 100 earthen mounds. The largest, Monks Mound, covers roughly 14 acres at its base and stands about 100 feet high.

And it was built by people carrying baskets of soil on their backs. There was a plaza laid out and leveled across dozens of acres and a set of large timber post circles that align on solar events, which archaeologists nicknamed Woodhenge. And there's mound 72. Melvin Fowler excavated it between 1967 and 1971. It's a ridgetop mound, unimpressive to look at, sitting about half a mile south of Monk's mound.

Inside it, Fowler identified around 270 burials, including five mass graves, each holding between 20 and more than 50 people, along with many individual and small group interments. The radiocarbon work places the activity roughly between the years 1,200, during Cahokia's rise and peak. The famous feature is what became known as the Beated Burial, where individuals were laid on a platform of something like 20,000 marine shell, beads arranged in the shape of a bird. For decades, the standard reading was that this was a paramount chief and a companion, both males surrounded by retainers, with the bird shape linked to a hero figure from later native oral tradition. In 2016, Thomas Emerson, Kristen Headman, Eve Hargrave, and their colleagues published a reanalysis in American antiquity. The Beated Burial Complex contains at least 12 individuals rather than the six previously reported.

The two central individuals are a male and a female, not two males. Other male and female pairs are present, and at least one child. The authors argued that the whole warrior chief interpretation needs setting aside in favor of something organized around creation, renewal, and fertility. The other burials in that mound are harder to reinterpret. One feature held 53 young women, most of them between about 15 and 25 years old, laid out in two orderly rows with their heads oriented the same direction. A separate feature held an upper layer of 15 men and women, placed on cedar litters, and beneath them a mass grave of 39 people who'd been mutilated and thrown in.

In that lower deposit, at least one individual was cataloged with the fingers dug into the soil, which is the observation behind the frequently repeated claim that some of them went into the pit alive. Strontium isotope analysis has since undercut an earlier hypothesis that these were tribute victims brought in from distant communities. Testing across more than 100 individuals from Cahokia found the victims were overwhelmingly local, and that every one of the 39 in the lower mass grave had a signature consistent with Cahokia or its immediate surroundings. The people killed at Cahokia were, for the most part, Cahokians. Whatever this was, it wasn't. something a city did to outsiders. It was something a city did to its own. Around 1175, Cahokians built a

palisade around the central precinct. It enclosed the core with bastions spaced along it for archers, and it was rebuilt at least three times, with each rebuild consuming something on the order of 20,000 logs. You don't build that once by accident and you certainly don't build it four times. Something out there, or in there, required a wall. Then the city came to be. came apart. Population declines through the 1200s, and by roughly 1,350, the sites essentially empty. The old explanation, proposed in 1993, was that Cahokians deforested the uplands for all that timber, which caused erosion, which caused the local creeks to flood the floodplain repeatedly. It's a tidy story about a society destroying itself with its own success, and it's been repeated

for 30 years. In 2021, Caitlin Rankin and her colleagues published excavation results in geo-archiology that don't support it. They dug around a mound in the Cahokia Creek floodplain and examined the ground surface directly. That surface stayed stable from the Mississippian occupation all the way to the mid-1800s, when industrial-era land use finally destabilized it. The erosion and the repeated local flooding that the wood overuse hypothesis requires just aren't there in the sediment. What is there is climate and the big river. Samuel Munoz and his colleagues working with cores from Horseshoe Lake identified a series of major Mississippi River flood events, including a large one with a modeled age around 1160, after a long stretch with no major flooding. A Jay White and colleagues then

published work in 2019 using fecal stanols, which are compounds from human waste that accumulate in lake sediments and can serve as a population proxy. Their record shows population decline beginning around 1150, lining up with that flood and with a shift toward drier growing seasons. So a great flood and a run of bad summers, layered on top of whatever social arrangement, produced those mass graves and that palisade. Cahokia's decline isn't one thing. The aftermath is what sticks with me.

The depopulation wasn't limited to Cahokia. across the central Mississippi Valley, a huge region that the archaeologist Stephen Williams named the vacant quarter went largely empty in the 1400s before any Europeans set foot there. When French explorers came through in the 1600s, the mounds were standing in plain sight, and the people living in the area didn't claim them. The name Cahokia comes from a tribe that lived nearby, much later, and had no connection to the builders. For the next two centuries, Americans looked at the largest earthworks on the world. the continent and invented lost races to explain them because they refused to credit the ancestors of

the people they were busy displacing the mounds were never lost the information about them was in the 12th century the Khmer empire built the largest pre-industrial settlement complex known anywhere in the world airborne survey work led by damien evans and colleagues first with radar and later with Lidar mapped a low-density urban sprawl around the temple centers extending across roughly 1,000 square kilometers. The population estimates get argued over, and I'm not going to pick a number. But nobody argues about the infrastructure,

because it's still there in the ground. Encore ran on water. The Khmer built berets, enormous rectangular reservoirs, with the West Beret measuring roughly 8 kilometers by 2, along with a network of canals, embankments, and distribution channels designed to capture the monsoon and carry the water through a dry sea. Encore Watt itself built in the first half of the 1100s under Suria Varmine the second sits inside a moat that's part of that same hydraulic thinking.

It's a system and systems have failure modes. In 2010, Brendan Buckley and colleagues published tree ring work from a long-lived conifer species growing in the highlands of Vietnam. The rings show two extended drought periods, one running roughly from 1345 to 1375, and another in the early 1400s, with unusually intense monsoon years in between. That combination is worse than either extreme on its own. Drought starves the reservoirs and the rice crop. Then a violent monsoon dumps water into a system that's been under-maintained and blows out the channels. The physical evidence shows up in the canals themselves, where you can see breaching and hasty repairs made with stone blocks robbed from temple structures.

The traditional end date for Angkor is 1431, when forces from Ayutthaya, in what's now Thailand, are said to have taken the city, after which the Khmer capital shifted south toward Phnom Penh. That date comes from later chronicles rather than contemporary records, and the 15th century at Angkor is essentially a blank in the written evidence. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. Dan Penny put it about as bluntly as you can. that we don't have a written record telling us why they left, or when, or how. In 2019, Penny and his colleagues published sediment core work from the moat of Angkor-Tom, the last of the Great Walled Citadels. They track signals for burning, forest disturbance, and soil erosion,

which are the traces left by people living and working in a landscape. Those signals declined, starting in the first decades of the 1300s. By the end of that century, the moat had gone over to, floating swamp vegetation, which means nobody was maintaining it. Penny's conclusion was that the infrastructure didn't fail and drive people away. The people who ran the infrastructure left first over the course of a century, and the infrastructure failed afterward because there wasn't anybody left with a reason to fix it. That's a quieter ending than an invasion and a more uncomfortable one. Nobody destroyed Ancor. The people with power and options relocated toward places with better access

to maritime trade. Gradually, one household and one court at a time, and the greatest hydraulic city in the world turned into something you had to maintain for reasons that no longer applied. Angkor Watt itself was never abandoned at all. It stayed an active Buddhist site continuously, and there were monks there when European visitors started writing about it in the 1500s. The last one's different, because the disturbing part isn't what the people did. It's what got said about them afterward. Rapa Nui, also called Easter Island, sits about

1,900 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island, and about 3,700 kilometers from South America. Polynesian voyagers reached it, on the best current radio carbon evidence, around the year 1200. On an island roughly 15 miles

long and 7.5 miles across at its widest, with no metal and no draft animals, they carved close to a thousand monumental stone figures. The Moai, most of them from volcanic tough in the quarry at Rano-Raraku, and they moved many of them miles across the island and stood them upright on stone platforms. The story most people know goes like this. The islanders cut down all the trees to move their statues, the ecosystem collapsed, they starved, they fell into warfare and cannibalism,

and by the time Europeans arrived, they were the remnant of a self-destroyed society. That version got popularized most effectively by Jared Diamond, and it's been told to millions of people as a parable about environmental limits. The island did lose its forest. That isn't in dispute. A large palm species that once covered it is gone. But the mechanism's been challenged hard, most prominently by Terry Hunt and Carl Leipo,

who pointed to the Polynesian rat, which arrived with the settlers as either stowaway or food source, and which reproduces explosively with no predile. palm nuts recovered from the island show Rat gnaw marks. Rats eating seeds don't just reduce a forest. They stop it from regenerating. Deforestation on Rapa Nui probably had more than one cause, and human clearing for agriculture was certainly one of them. But the simple picture of islanders knocking down the last tree isn't what the evidence supports. The bigger problem is the collapse itself. The islanders farmed using lithic mulching, which means breaking up volcanic rock

by hand and working it into the soil, where it retains moisture, moderate's temperature, checks the wind, and releases nutrients from freshly exposed surfaces. Those rock gardens are visible from the air, and how much land they cover tells you something about how many people the island could feed. In 2024, Dylan Davis, Carl Leipo, Robert DeNapley and colleagues published a study in science advances that mapped them using shortwave infrared satellite imagery and machine learning trained on ground survey. Their result cut the estimated area drastically, from a previous range of roughly four to 21 square kilometers,

down to about three quarters of a square kilometer, which is somewhere near 188 acres. Running productivity estimates on that area, they calculated a carrying capacity around 3,000 people, and 3,000 is right about what the earliest European visitors reported seeing. if the peak population was 3,000 and the contact population was 3,000. There isn't a crash left to explain. Then in September of 2024, a team led by Victor Moreno Meyer and Barbara Sousa Demota,

published in Nature. They sequenced the genomes of 15 ancient Rapa Nui individuals. Radiocarbon dated between about 1670 and 1950, working in collaboration with the current Rapa Nui community, from remains held at the Muzé de Lééézsche individuals. Lome in Paris. Genomes carry the signature of population history. A severe crash leaves a bottleneck, a measurable narrowing of genetic diversity. They went looking for a bottleneck corresponding to a 17th century collapse and didn't find one. What they found instead was a small population

that grew steadily from settlement through European contact and then hit a wall in the 1860s. They found something else too. Those ancient individuals carry native American ancestry at around 10%, similar to present-day Rapa Nui, and the admixture dates to roughly the years 1250 to 1430. That's before Columbus, and centuries before any European reached Rapa Nui. Polynesians and indigenous Americans met and had children together, and the descendants of that meeting were living on Rapa Nui long before any European saw the place. The authors are careful to say they can't determine where the meeting happened, and I'll be

equally careful, because that's a genuinely open question. So here's what actually collapsed the population of Rapa Nui. And the record on this is documentary rather than archaeological. Jacob Raghavine arrived on Easter Sunday of 1722 and estimated a couple thousand people with statues standing. Over the following century and a half came European ships and with them disease. Then in December of 1862, Peruvian slave ships arrived and took islanders away to labor in the guano workings and estates of Peru. The number usually given is somewhere between 1,400 and 1,500 people, which sources describe as anywhere from a third to half the island's population, and the ruling Ariki and others holding traditional knowledge were among them. Most died in Peru.

International protest eventually forced a repatriation, and the repatriation turned turned into a disaster of its own, because smallpox and tuberculosis went through the returning group. Accounts differ on how many made it back alive, but they're all in the range of about a dozen to 15 people, and they carried the epidemics home with them. Then came Jean-Baptiste-Dutro Borgnier, a French businessman who arrived in 1868, intending to run the island as a sheep ranch, and who shipped islanders off to plantations in Tahiti. In 1871, missionaries and commons, with him removed 275 more Rapa Nui to other islands, which left something like 230 people behind. By 1877, the recorded population of Rapa Nui was 111. That isn't a society that ate itself.

That's a society that was raided, infected, dispossessed, and shipped away in a documented sequence by people who wrote down what they were doing while they did it. And then, over the century that followed, the descendants of that same outside world produced a story in which the islanders had done it to themselves and taught it in schools as a moral lesson about resource management. A lot of what I've done in this episode is take away the version of these stories most people carry around. The massacre at Mohenjo Daro that never happened. The sea peoples who were probably one factor among several rather than a wave of destroyers. The volcano that didn't destroyers, the volcano that didn't destroy Crete, the single year that supposedly ended Rome, which nobody living in Rome noticed.

The Cahokians who supposedly cut down their own forests and drowned their own city. The islanders who supposedly committed ecological suicide. That doesn't leave us with nothing. It leaves us with something harder and a lot more specific. Every one of these cases has a moment where you can see people making a decision. Officials at Hattusa loading the archives onto carts and leaving the rest of the population in the city. A Roman mint striking copper coins with a silver wash thin enough to rub off in a pocket, year after year, because the alternative was not paying the army.

People at Dos Peles pulling apart their own temples to build a wall across the plaza where their kings used to perform. Somebody at Cahokia deciding that 53 young women from their own community would go into a pit in two neat rows, and then somebody else, generations later, deciding to put a wall around the whole center of town. Whoever came to Concoen and killed the royal family and left the jade on the bodies. The people of Akritiri walking away from their houses with their valuables and never coming back to somewhere we've never found.

None of these people vanished. They walked mostly. They went to other valleys and other rivers, and their descendants are alive right now, in Guatemala and Chiapas, at Hopi and Zuni, and along the Rio Grande, in Cambodia, in Sindh and Punjab, in Britain and Italy, in Greece and Turkey, and on Rapa Nui. What ended was a way of organizing life that had stopped being worth the cost of maintaining it, and in several of these cases the last generation to pay that cost paid it in blood. What I keep returning to is Amarapi's letter, sitting in the ash of a city that was never rebuilt.

A working government, a functioning postal system between kingdoms, a scribes, a scribes, with wet clay and a stylus, all of it operating normally right up to the last hour. There's no sense anywhere in that letter that the world was ending. He simply wanted help with seven ships, and he thought there'd be a next week in which that help might arrive. Before I let you go, I want to take a minute and say a few things. If you enjoyed the show, there are a few easy things you can do that help more than you'd think.

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