Gone Medieval - How The Weather Shaped Medieval North America

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

One of the most consequential eras in North American history was the Medieval Warm Period of 800-1300 CE, when the continent was shaped by climate change or – as its peoples then believed – controlled by gods of wind and water. A great religious movement swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley, sometimes because of worsening living conditions and sometimes by improved agricultural yields caused by global warming. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to archaeologist Dr. Timothy Pauketat, author of Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America.  He has followed the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders and farmers led by the weather to migrate long distances to new lands.This episode was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I've been looking for something we could do on medieval North America since Gone Medieval was born. And now Timothy Porkatt's new book, Gods of Thunder, how climate change, travel and spirituality reshaped pre-colonial America has given me the perfect chance to explore this fascinating topic. Tim is professor of anthropology and medieval studies at the University of Illinois, and I'm delighted he's joining us now to talk more about this great topic. Thank you for joining us, Tim. Thank you. I'm happy

to be here. So I confess that this is a period of North American history that I just know nothing about. What kind of sources were you able to leverage to bring the book together? What is the available material when studying this period? Ninety-nine percent of what we have is archaeological. Then there are many regions in North America that are very well studied, especially during the medieval warm period. And so we actually know quite a lot about a lot of places. For the other 1%, I draw a little bit on actual indigenous writing, the Maya, for instance. They have political records of who ascended to the throne on what day and who conquered whom. And then also, maybe more than 1%, I bring in some historic sources, especially indigenous

historic accounts and a series of conquistadors, the Spanish especially, who entered in the 1500s, entered the continent, and recorded what they saw. And some of those sources are actually quite good. One in particular were the travelers started in Florida, have some bad luck, sail through the Gulf crash land in Texas, and then traverse much of northern Mexico and the American Southwest and finally end up in Mexico City. And that's really helpful because that's the whole area that I cover in the book. Their misfortune was actually a bit of good luck for us. That's right.

But it must present lots of challenges that there isn't a large wealth of written records that you're having to interpret quite a bit from the archaeology, I guess. As an archaeologist, I've never relied on written records so much, in part because written records are usually written by a very small subset of people who have specific views about the world, very elite views or the views of conquerors. they don't record the kinds of information that we need anyway. When we're concerned with how is life changing, how are cultures changing, how are they interconnected, they simply don't go there.

And that's why I have as an archaeologist a simple faith in the material record and what we can know if you do very careful, detailed study of the histories of people before European contact. Your book deals with the centuries of the medieval warm period. So can you just give us an idea to start off with, please, of when and what that was? The medieval warm period generously dated runs from about C.E. 800 to about 1,300. Before that period and after that period, there are cooler climate in the northern hemisphere for those five centuries or so. Climate turns warmer, pretty much across the northern hemisphere, not so much in the

southern hemisphere. And it also plays out differently in different parts of the northern hemisphere. For some parts of the northern hemisphere, that warmer period is. accompanied by increased moisture as well. And for other parts of that same period, it's accompanied by dry periods. Climate change generally plays out always in local ways that diverge from other regions. It's never enough to say, oh, it's a warm period, so therefore everything must be changing uniformly, and now it doesn't work that way. And why is the medieval warm period important? I guess when we see warm periods throughout history, it tends to generate an abundance of crops quite often,

and it means that societies flourish and things like that. Do we see that happen? during this particular warm period? Yes, certainly in Europe. The production of crops is not only enabled in terms of more productivity, but the state power increases in order to appropriate or because people can't appropriate those agricultural resources in new and exciting ways, which leads to a whole variety of other historical outcomes. Same thing happens in North America as well.

The cultural bases for change are different, in some cases dramatically different from Europe and Asia. But in other ways, there's some striking similarities. And certainly agriculture matters. Mays agriculture, which had been mostly restricted to greater Mesoamerica, including the American Southwest, spreads fairly rapidly in the medieval warm period into the rest of North America, especially eastern North America, has dramatic implications. And what kind of effects do we see that leaving behind, I guess in the archaeological record? What changes do we see as a result of those developments? The ability of central forces, cities to appropriate resources, just like in other parts of the world, that happens in North America leading to the birth of new cities in various parts

of North America. Cahokia being the one that I work at, which was not there before the medieval warm period, and really it is enabled because of corn, which is because of climate change. It also changes the way people in their daily lives, especially agriculturalists, are able to relate to what they interpret as spiritual forces on the landscape, which they would be reading through crops or animal movements or weather events, would have been a very spiritual experience. And so we have to almost get down to that level to understand how then is climate change and the agricultural changes generally affecting society. And I guess as an historian based in the UK, I am guilty of being hugely Eurocentric in my view of all of these things. But is the effect

of the medieval warm period well understood on North America, or is it something that's been overlooked in the past? It's both. It's people for a long time. They had access to environmental records, certainly back into the 20th century, knew that there were macro correlations with medieval warm period and culture change and the appearance or disappearance of certain societies. Typically didn't and still don't think about cause and effect quite the right way. Archaeologists are really guilty of this. They've gotten hung up on generalizing about societal types or like a hierarchical society versus a non-hierical society as if the locus of historical change is right there in the hierarchy or in the leadership or the government. And some of it is. A lot of change, however, comes from

the way people live every day on the landscape because, of course, even politicians recognize that to appropriate things from most of the ordinary people out there, they have to be a bit more in tune with or know what buttons to push in order to appropriate surplus. In past, archaeologists have settled just for thinking, was this a hierarchical society or not, plus climate change equals, oh, here's the effects. And those aren't anymore today, not a very satisfactory explanation of long-term historical change. And over the period of the book, what kind of societal change do we see? How much do we understand about how societies were structured during this period and how they may be changed over the centuries of the medieval warm period?

I think first it's probably good to recognize that in North America, especially, when we talk about urban or the presence or absence of cities, there are different kinds of cities in North America, and some of them are vacant. There's a ceremonial or a monumental core. I'd say a Maya city is often really elaborate stone pyramid complexes. Some of those have very few people living at them. Same thing in certain parts of North America, in the southwest, Chaco Canyon, for instance, incredibly elaborate monumental complexes, masonry buildings, but not that many people. The people are living outside, and they just keep coming in. They go in and out of centers, which some people will argue are cities and other people will say, we don't have enough people so they can't be cities.

That's important to recognize. So it's hard to even classify societies then because at the core of this society is a vacant city. What does that mean? Is it urban? And so there's a lot of debate around that. Having said at the beginning of the medieval period, there were definitely cities, both populated and these kind of empty, vacant ceremonial complexes across Mesoamerica, that is, from the Panaco River, which is midway down the Gulf Coast in Mexico, all the way down into the Maya heartland of the Yucatan Peninsula. There are a mix of these kind of vacant, semi-vacent, and fully populated cities across that area. There aren't the same kind of cities north of. the contemporary border of the US and Mexico right now, however, that follows the medieval

warm period beginning and the arrival of corn and intensification. So cities and townscapes are later there. And that is then in fact what the Europeans see, Spanish when they first arrive in Florida and they move through the southeast, they see what are essentially a whole bunch of little cities. Those kinds of things did not really exist in the same way before 800 AD by and large. So the suggestion I guess would be that that's a direct result of climate change, that the warm period in the northern hemisphere, the spread of crops means the spread of people and the creation of lots of these cities. Yeah, but it plays out in such a complex way that it's hard to reduce it to that because certainly you could imagine other outcomes. That is, that there could have been similar kind of climate change and for various reasons, given the configuration of peoples and their identities or whatever across the land. landscape, maybe they wouldn't have adopted corn and moved to cities. But in this case, they did.

And you mentioned Cahokia, where you work, is possibly one of the better known cities. I was partly going to ask whether cities like Cahogia were commonplace or whether that was quite unique. We've sort of covered that, that there are different kinds of cities dotted all around. But what do we know about Cahokia in particular? At the level of the continent, we know that it is the biggest city north of the heartland of Mesoamerica. As there are other large, towns and cities up all the way to the northern edge of Mesoamerica, which is almost to Texas, not quite, but they're still not as large as the Valley of Mexico urban complexes, which are based around imperial societies, and there's super large cities, 100,000, 200,000 people.

And Cahokia, which is not nearly that large, that's 20,000 people maximum, which is still giant, however, based on what came before it, and then even what followed it in the North American mainland, the American Southeast and Midwest. So we know that it's unique on the landscape, however you slice and dice the continent. We also know that it's the trend setter, it's the archetype of everything that follows. And that means it's a founding city. It's the biggest ever in North America, north of the U.S.-Mexico border. Because it's so large, it has an inordinately large historical impact on all the various peoples of the time.

And it realizes that impact or by, in fact, a kind of colonization process or a, a missionization, sometimes some of my students will call it, there were groups of Kohokians and quite possibly want to be elites or emerging elites travel long distances up the Mississippi River to Wisconsin and Minnesota, down the Mississippi River, probably to the coast and all the way to Mexico, but certainly into Louisiana and certainly over into Texas and southeastern Oklahoma, getting in contact with other people, the Caddo who are living there. It's a very vibrant, demographically large scale, but also historically, the footprint of this place, you can see it.

Archaeologists always talk about, well, I'm in Florida. Do I see Cahokee impacts over here? And the answer is usually, yes, in some way, you'll see it. South Carolina, Indiana, what have you. In some ways, even it has a bigger historical footprint or impact than many larger Mesoamerican cities, just because there are so many cities down there already. You don't have the ability to have the kind of historical impact that Cahokee does. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and on my podcast, not just the Tudors from History Hit,

I try to make sense of everything that baffled our early modern ancestors. Like, what do you do with your waist? If you put your dung hill up against your neighbour's wall, you're going to cause rising dump. Would Henry the ape ever consider executing his wife, the Queen of England, and Berlin? I'm not even sure if the Billins took it seriously because why would they have any reason to suspect Henry the 8th would really get rid of his queen. And why do men grow beards? During puberty, the male body heats up and a smoke rises in the body, pushes out the hair in the face.

So the beard is actually a form of excrement. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Twice a week every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the book's title is Gods of Thunder, which by the way is a fantastic title. I love it. And you really talk about how incredibly similar religious beliefs began to spring up during this period amongst people that were at least apparently incredibly disconnected. So do you believe that the medieval warm period was driving these new religious beliefs? What did people think about the God of Thunder in his various guises around North America? So the short answer is yes, I do think that there is religious development and that this God is one. that's beneficent and one that's not, and they're often creator gods that play off one another,

that there's a cult or a movement that is spreading and that different people in different localities or regions adopt and then reinvent and change for their own purposes. I do think that is connected to climate change across the area of concern in North America because it's hitting people at the level of the every day and they notice it. For instance, in the Maya region, famously, there are droughts and that you have these classic Maya kingdoms that begin collapsing at the end of the 8th century in the early 9th century. And they're replaced with archaeological evidence of a new kind of religious practice where people are going to water temples or circular water shrines, little platforms with little circular buildings on top. Some of them are sweat lodges or people go in for

sweat and that's the way they engage water as atomized. They're doing that because there's a lack of water. They can't grow crops. They can't pay the tribute that the kings demanding in cities. So they turn to a different way of relating to supernatural forces. And it's a kind of a new religious movement that undercuts classic Maya kingdoms. And they all fall apart. That all happens in the 800s by large. Similar kind of issues with not having enough water is striking the interior of Mexico as well, the southern Altaplano region where you have these more vacant kind of ceremonial complexes that are struggling to keep bringing their farmers in for ceremonies and tribute reasons. And some of those collapse. The big imperial city is already collapsed by this time.

So people are thrown into this period of historical, political uncertainty at the same time climate is drying out and getting warmer and they are turning to gods. And in particular, the gods that bring rain. And these are the thunder gods. And there's a whole pantheon of other gods that are related to thunder gods, but the thunder gods are all important because they bring the rain gods and they work with the wind gods. Those gods are known historically. The Spanish Cortez and his folks come in and they record the names and the powers of all these gods. So those gods last into that historic period. Very similar temples, which is circular buildings on top of circular platform mounds, spreads north. It's a little unclear to the southwests since there were already a circular

religious building in the southwest kivas. But there's an argument to be made that there are a series of new kind of circular platform buildings that are constructed there in the early medieval war period. At the same time, these kind of movements are spreading up the southern plains and into what becomes Cahokia. So you just plotted the dates of all these religious movements involving circular buildings on platforms. Isograph keep going north through time. But in the north, it's different. It's not because they have to because landscape is drying out. It's the opposite. You have people who hadn't yet adopted corn in many of these regions, adopting corn because the warmer weather is also wetter.

The thunderstorms are rolling in a bit more reliably and bringing more rain. So the thunder gods there become not out of desperation, but they're being adopted because it's a celebration, let's say, of this new climate that they are benefiting from. And that really is why you do get Kohokia about 100, yeah, 100, 150 years later than the collapsing Maya in the South. It's fascinating that it's kind of coming from two angles, as you say, from the need for more rain leading to a focus on the thunder gods, to also gratefulness further north that there is more rain, which is providing new sources of food and incomes, being a thankful act. So it's interesting that there's both of those things going on. As you say, you can kind of trace it north, but the reason changes, but the interest stays the same. and the gods are really similar.

And other anthropologists have made this argument going back into the 1940s and 50s. Look, the gods that show up here in the plains and in the Midwest through the medieval period all the way to today in many ways are very similar. Some of the stories that people told about them even sound Mesoamerican. So that case has been made. And I think what's really happened in the last 20 years or so is that the archaeology has come along and you can support those earlier arguments from the 40s and 50s based on iconography and narratives from indigenous people. You can trace that archaeologically as well now.

So is the sense now that these gods are moving north rather than sort of springing up independently coincidentally the same, that they're actually spreading north as the medieval warm period goes on? Yes, with some reservations. That is, one would imagine they're already gods. People had their supernatural deities that they recognize, and there may well have been some kind of wind or thunder god already. Certainly, you can't really see it archaeologically, but one could guess maybe there was something already there. So what may be happening is a reinvigoration or a glomming on of Mesoamerican beliefs or practices involving circular buildings and temples, onto pre-Age beliefs in American Southwest and the Southern Plains in the Caddo region, and then up the Mississippi River to Cahokia.

So it's probably really complicated because even in Mesoamerica, you could go from one city and one society, a couple hundred kilometers maybe away, and you see the same gods, but they're still a little different. So even there, they're not sharing 100% of the practices and beliefs of the same gods in adjacent regions. And it's interesting as well that we tend to view history as being about the big moments and the decisive actions or the rulers who make changes. But it's interesting to see that this is a real massive cultural shift based on people's everyday experiences, the lack of water or an increasing amount of water improving crop yields and things. It's interesting that this is a huge change based on an everyday experience of ordinary people.

Yeah. Now, the mechanism for some of this change, let's play out a scenario. Let's say we're somewhere in the Mississippi Valley. And people, the farmers are realizing the climate is shifted. And maybe even corn has been offered up. People have realized there's a new crop called corn and maybe they could grow it. And there may even be new stories and new ideas that have come in with corn, but it's entirely likely that still that wasn't sufficient. That is, people would need a model, especially emergent rulers, people organizing society, but still might think they need a model for like, how do we organize society now, given the new realities of increased precipitation and this thing called corn. And that reality, it might be really important to align their understanding of what's

going on with the cosmos and the gods. And so perhaps they need to travel, get the full understanding of the wider world. And so those people would be traveling up and down the river and probably to the coast. But that's happening all over. Incipient leaders or people who are just responsible for the welfare of other folks have to gain knowledge somewhere and educate themselves. And that usually in the past, whether you're in Europe or you're in medieval America, involve travel. And we can see some hints of that. That is, we can see some hints in the southwest of travel of people from Chaco into Mexico. You can certainly see trans-Mexico travel, and you can see some travel evidence from people from Cahokia going south to Cato country and probably into Mesoamerica back at Cahokia. And then you get

these similarities that people say, oh, kind of looks Mexican. Because it is. It's not just the organic changes at the level of the everyday, which are all important. It's all. It's all also the fact there were one-off trips being made where people are seeking that kind of knowledge that help them then solidify their own place back home. And forgive me if I'm showing my own ignorance again here of this topic. But is your research and this work that you're doing helping us to understand that the Mesoamerican and North American worlds were better connected than we thought they were? Or did we always know that they were quite well connected? Oh, no. There's been a few folks always promoting the idea that there were connections. People in the past

then always gotten hung up whether or not there was trade. So people thought the only connections that must matter would be regular trade. And that's how you get culture change. That's shifted where we realize now, no, these kinds of cultural connections, even if they're like just a few one-off events over a period of decades or centuries, really matter historically. That has allowed us to re-appreciate the connections between Mesoamerica and other parts of North America. In some cases, yes, they do involve trade.

there was a certain kind of trade between the Pueblos of the southwest and portions of West Mexico, especially. But there was still this other layer of change that had to do with sacred knowledge that people would learn in one place and then take back and then instruct the other folks back home. Here's the sacred knowledge from this far off land. Clearly, it's connected to the gods, therefore we should do it here. That kind of connection, as I said, is much more significant than other earlier archaeologists thought. And so much of the history that we see evolving through your book, through the medieval warm period,

is a reaction to climate change, as we've been talking about all along. What do you think it can tell us about the world today? We have a lot of climate challenges today. Can it give us any warnings, any messages, any thoughts for what might be happening in our world today? People tend to externalize climate change, as if there's our society, and then climate change is out there, and it's changing us in a very indoor.

direct way. And this North American medieval case, to me anyway, suggests climate is so intimately connected to humanity. History, yes, but also to who we think we are relative to the outside world, whether it be the atmosphere of the earth, you know, or the animals that are moving around. So we need to think a bit more about how interconnected we are to the global climate that plays out in ways that we kind of overlook. And certainly there are direct and dramatic impacts on society and its organization, infrastructure and all that exists, yes, but there's still this other deeper layer that we do tend to overlook. Then I think the other thing that I pull out of this kind of review is there are alternatives.

Things go bad for some people in North America, but things go well for other people in other parts of North America. We have to be attuned to the fact that climate change is going to play out differently in different parts of the world. We may need to plan for the differential effects and how we then reintegrate around those differential effects as a global community. Yeah, when we see lots of talk today, I guess, about how is the climate changing? It's colder and wetter here rather than being warmer.

But this case perfectly explains how that regional difference is part of the whole that's going on. And also, I think one of the interesting things is that as we spoke about, the everyday changes to people's lives caused by a different climate drive changes that you can then spread out and see happening over five centuries. You know, it's not that things change today and the world is different tomorrow. This plays out over potentially centuries. We have to take that macro and micro view of what's going on with climate change today. Yeah, that's exactly right.

And it's not only that the medieval change is played out over the medieval period. Those cultural changes last all the way to today, the disposition of different peoples and their identities and beliefs across North America and the tensions between indigenous and non-indigenous people. That's all rooted in this medieval period. and the changes that came with that. And that's partly why I also use these early Spanish conquistadors as our initial encounter in the book

with a very different kind of world that has developed because of this larger climatic period. That's been absolutely fascinating, Tim. Thank you so much for joining us and talking us through some of that fascinating detail. It's been my pleasure. Tim's book, Gods of Thunder, how climate change, travel and spirituality,

reshaped pre-colonial America, is out now. If you'd like to learn even more about medieval North America. You can join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts, including Spotify. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and you'd like a little bit more medieval goodness in your life, then you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show

notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.