Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [348]
No one interested in the Maya should miss Mary Ellen Miller, The Murals of Bonampak (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), with its beautiful color as well as black-and-white reproductions of the murals and their grisly torture scenes; nor Justin Kerr’s series of volumes reproducing Maya pottery, The Maya Vase Book (New York: Kerr Associates, various dates). The fascinating story of how Maya writing was deciphered is related by Michael Coe, Breaking the Maya Code, 2nd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), and Stephen Houston, Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazareigos, and David Stuart, The Decipherment of Ancient Maya Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2001). The reservoirs of Tikal are described by Vernon Scarborough and Gari Gallopin, “A water storage adaptation in the Maya lowlands” (Science 251:658-662 (1991)). Lisa Lucero’s article “The collapse of the Classic Maya: a case for the role of water control” (American Anthropologist 104:814-826 (2002)) explains why differing local water problems might have contributed to the non-uniformity of the Classic collapse, with different cities meeting differing fates at different dates. Arturo Gómez-Pompa, José Salvador Flores, and Victoria Sosa, “The ‘pet kot’: a man-made tropical forest of the Maya” (Interciencia 12:10-15 (1987)) describe Maya cultivation of forest patches with useful trees. Timothy Beach, “Soil catenas, tropical deforestation, and ancient and contemporary soil erosion in the Petén, Guatemala” (Physical Geography 19:378-405 (1998)) shows that the Maya in some areas but not in others were able to reduce soil erosion by terracing. Richard Hansen et al., “Climatic and environmental variability in the rise of Maya civilization: a preliminary perspective from northern Petén” (Ancient Mesoamerica 13:273-295 (2002)) presents a multidisciplinary study of an area densely populated already in pre-Classic times, and yielding evidence for plaster production as a driving force behind deforestation there.
Chapters 6-8
Vikings: The North Atlanta Saga, edited by William Fitzhugh and Elisabeth Ward (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), is a multiauthored volume, beautifully illustrated in color, whose 31 chapters cover in detail the Vikings’ society, their expansion over Europe, and their North Atlantic colonies. Shorter, single-authored overviews of the Vikings include Eric Christiansen, The Norsemen in the Viking Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), F. Donald Logan, The Vikings in History, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1991), and Else Roestahl, The Vikings (New York: Penguin, 1987). Gwyn Jones, Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986) and G. J. Marcus, The Conquest of the North Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981) are instead concerned specifically with the Vikings’ three remote North Atlantic colonies of Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. A useful additional feature of Jones’s book is that among its appendices are translations of the most relevant saga source documents, including the Book of the Icelanders, both of the Vinland sagas, and the Story of Einar Sokkason.
Two recent books summarizing Iceland’s history are Jesse Byock, Viking Age Iceland (New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001), which takes the story up to the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth in 1262-1264, and which builds on the same author’s earlier Medieval Iceland: Society, Sagas, and Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and