Catastrophe: A Quest for the Origins of the Modern World by David Keys,
Ballantine, $25, ISBN 0345408764 336
AN AGREEABLE climate, a landscape dotted with vineyards and rich fields
stretching above sheltered bays鈥攚hat more could a holidaymaker want? Good
links with the capital city, theatres, races, yachts? Both towns had them. A
dead volcano added a touch of drama to the view.
Sadly, both inhabitants and holidaymakers were wrong about the volcano. After
the briefest of warnings鈥攁 shower of ash and cinder that was ignored by
most鈥攁 deadly pyroclastic blast buried them. The surrounding countryside
was covered in a slurry of lava, poisonous superheated gases and ash. In just a
few hours Pompeii and Herculaneum were destroyed.
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Roman civilisation itself died eventually, but in contrast to Pompeii鈥檚
demise this was a long drawn-out affair. There was no sudden catastrophe that
wiped out emperor and army, citizen and slave. The death of a civilisation is
obviously a complex phenomenon.
Thousands of societies have flourished and faded, and what constitutes a
civilisation differs from culture to culture. The word itself comes from
civis, meaning city, clearly implying that city dwellers are civilised.
Civilised people have stable structures for governing, create networks for
trade, and encourage the arts and crafts.
Archaeologists spend their lives sifting the evidence and offering possible
interpretations鈥攁nd all of these are open to future revision. Only rarely,
as with Pompeii鈥檚 volcanic burial in AD 79 or the El Ni帽o of around AD
600 which devastated coastal Peru, do natural phenomena provide the sole answer.
More commonly, the wounds are self-inflicted. For example, it was deforestation
that slowly destroyed the ancient civilisations of the peoples of the
Mediterranean basin. Trees were felled for fuel, tools, building
materials鈥攁nd more. As cities and populations grew, the demand for wood
rose鈥攂y late Roman times, wood was being imported into Italy from the
surrounding provinces. Trees and ground cover were also being consumed faster
than they could replenish themselves as goat-keeping spread round the
Mediterranean lands. Topsoil was exposed to sun and wind, became eroded and
choked waterways and marshlands, leaving the semi-arid landscape that remains
today. On Easter Island, the incomers had a similar effect on the land: they
used up wood faster than it could grow. The last trees perished a few hundred
years ago.
While modern archaeological techniques reveal ever more of the past, the big
idea still holds sway over our imaginations. We remain attracted to the notion
of a single solution to ancient mysteries, particularly those that apparently
reveal what centuries of scholarship have overlooked.
In Catastrophe, David Keys appears to be following the same
well-worn path, and his 鈥減rime movers鈥� are huge natural disasters. The book is
written as an account of a quest, but before he reveals the secret, he treats
readers to a selective account of the past 1500 years of world history. We rove
from the origins of Islam, through Chinese history, the demise of the Romans,
the kingdoms of the Franks and the Visigoths to England in the Dark Ages. Keys
is hammering home a single point: around AD 535 there was a cataclysm that
shattered global weather patterns. Social, economic and religious upheavals
followed, setting off a chain of events that created the modern world.
Keys puts a lot of emphasis on the Americas. But while he reveals undoubted
evidence that the region鈥檚 dramatic climatic regimes had major effects on the
civilisations there, he also shows a woeful ignorance of the wider picture. In
discussing the pre-Inca Huari people of the Andes, he tells us that their
invention of agricultural terracing was a response to the drought between AD 540
and AD 570. But the existence of larger earthworks in lowland South America
belies this idea. He also says that the Huari religion was based on a solar
deity whose descendant was the Inca Sun god. He suggests that this was an
imperial tradition arising from the cultural responses to the climatic events of
the 6th century鈥攁nd that this belief survived to blend with Spanish
Christianity hundreds of years later.
Unfortunately, the American case studies are riddled with errors of detail
that undermine the general principles of his argument. Give or take a few
highways, the imperial Inca road system was built by the Incas, not their Huari
predecessors. Water rituals were always a feature of pre-Columbian Peru and not
merely a response to a severe drought. Similarly in Mexico, ancient gods at the
huge metropolis of Teotihuacan cannot be identified solely by 700-year-old
hearsay鈥攚hat the Aztecs are supposed to have told the Spanish. The Spanish
put out too much propaganda for us to believe everything they said.
Keys then turns to what might have caused the climatic upheaval. First he
reviews and rejects a collision between the Earth and an asteroid. Neither was
it a comet impact. Eventually, Keys reveals the cataclysmic secret鈥攁 giant
volcanic explosion. The most likely candidate is one of two calderas that flank
the one produced in 1883 by the explosion of Krakatoa in the Sunda Strait
between Java and Sumatra.
In revelatory fashion, the author says that modern science has overlooked a
crucial Javanese source, The Book of Ancient Kings. While most regard
this as an example of late 19th-century anticolonial myth-making, Keys sees it
as preserving an account of an explosion around AD 416鈥攅xplaining away the
eighty-year discrepancy as the result of Javanese textual distortions and
misunderstandings.
Catastrophe is a book of our time, though. It offers a seductively
easy view of the past to a world beset by increasing climatic extremes and dire
warnings for the future. Keys hits the right note for a modern age obsessed with
disasters. By reducing the incredible diversity of human history to a checklist
of dates, however, we are all diminished, and the true relationships between
culture and nature are obscured.