Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [108]
As our fifth strand, we have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems, insofar as they perceived them. We shall return to this theme in Chapter 14.
Finally, while we still have some other past societies to consider in this book before we switch our attention to the modern world, we must already be struck by some parallels between the Maya and the past societies discussed in Chapters 2-4. As on Easter Island, Mangareva, and among the Anasazi, Maya environmental and population problems led to increasing warfare and civil strife. As on Easter Island and at Chaco Canyon, Maya peak population numbers were followed swiftly by political and social collapse. Paralleling the eventual extension of agriculture from Easter Island’s coastal lowlands to its uplands, and from the Mimbres floodplain to the hills, Copán’s inhabitants also expanded from the floodplain to the more fragile hill slopes, leaving them with a larger population to feed when the agricultural boom in the hills went bust. Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues, eventually crowned by pukao, and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster—reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. The passivity of Easter chiefs and Maya kings in the face of the real big threats to their societies completes our list of disquieting parallels.
CHAPTER 6
The Viking Prelude and Fugues
Experiments in the Atlantic ■ The Viking explosion ■ Autocatalysis ■ Viking agriculture ■ Iron ■ Viking chiefs ■ Viking religion ■ Orkneys, Shetlands, Faeroes ■ Iceland’s environment ■ Iceland’s history ■ Iceland in context ■ Vinland ■
When moviegoers of my generation hear the word “Vikings,” we picture chieftain Kirk Douglas, star of the unforgettable 1958 epic film The Vikings, clad in his nail-studded leather shirt as he leads his bearded barbarians on voyages of raiding, raping, and killing. Nearly half a century after watching that film on a date with a college girlfriend, I can still replay in my imagination the opening scene in which Viking warriors batter down a castle gate while its unsuspecting occupants carouse inside, the occupants scream as the Vikings burst in and slaughter them, and Kirk Douglas begs his beautiful captive Janet Leigh to heighten his pleasure by vainly attempting to resist him. There is much truth to those gory images: the Vikings did indeed terrorize medieval Europe for several centuries. In their own language (Old Norse), even the word vikingar meant “raiders.”
But other parts of the Viking story are equally romantic and more relevant to this book. Besides being feared pirates, the Vikings were farmers, traders, colonizers, and the first European explorers of the North Atlantic. The settlements that they founded met very different fates. Viking settlers of Continental Europe and the British Isles eventually merged with local populations and played a role in forming several nation-states, notably Russia, England, and France. The Vinland colony, representing Europeans’ first attempt to settle North America, was quickly abandoned; the Greenland colony, for 450 years the most remote outpost of European