They were largely at the mercy of the Native Americans.Īlso, the distances were insuperable. Unlike Columbus and his successors, who were able to plow down Indian resistance with firepower, the Norse were stuck five centuries earlier with just the standard Stone Age weapons. When the Vikings arrived in North America, the natives they encountered were no pushovers. They behaved pretty much like Hagar the Horrible, who heads off for France and returns to wife Helga the following morning with a knapsack bulging with candelabra. Why didn't they stick around?įirst of all, the Vikings were not really settlers. Beautiful country, at least as inviting as Scandinavia. They landed and certainly settled for a time in Newfoundland, possibly as far south as Nova Scotia. No one seriously questions that Norsemen, Leif Ericson et al., were here a good five centuries before Columbus. A unified civilization vanished, the realm was abandoned.Ī more intriguing question, perhaps, involves all those Vikings who aren't around. People left the cities, spread out looking for food. And so, when bad times came, so did class warfare. Moreover, as in many high-achieving cultures, there was a sharp disparity among the Mayan ruling class and the peasants, upon whose sweat these wondrous things were built. They relied on river travel, and the rivers were drying up seafarers, who could range farther in search of food and resources, managed better. The Maya were largely a landlocked civilization. Where are you? How parched are you compared with your neighbors? What resources have you access to when the going gets tough? It's always that way with real estate: location, location, location. It doesn't matter if you've figured out the phases of the moon, or if you have built obelisks that will endure for thousands of years. Climatic shifts tend to level the playing field. Okay, here's what probably happened: drought. Of course, some people say this about the disappearance of dinosaurs, too. A sort of "Independence Day" of the first millennium. They just quickly withered, leading to some preposterous speculation. They did not, so far as we know, fall under the thrall of a chemical addiction, like the 18th-century Chinese. They weren't conquered militarily, like the Greeks or Babylonians. No one has ever adequately explained the decline of the Maya. Within a hundred years or so, they were barely subsisting, doomed to a millennium of impoverishment and irrelevance.Īll great civilizations decline, but we usually know why. They were accomplished mathematicians and astronomers. Their architecture rivaled the Romans, their thinking approached the Greeks. Just before the year 1000, the Mayan civilization of Mexico dominated the North American continent. The two principal enduring puzzles of the early part of the millennium involve entire civilizations that by all rights should be around here, building things, running things, getting indicted, etc. What happened to the Maya? And while we're at it, why aren't we all named, like, Lars Bjorklund? Below, all mysteries are officially solved. One solution would be to acknowledge that there are some things that are unknowable, and move ahead gingerly, with dignity and caution and all deliberate speed.īing bang boom. They are the lingering mysteries of our era, and so long as these remain, we cannot look forward with complete freedom. In this business, being first is everything. In our continuing campaign to be The Official Newspaper of Millennial Excess, The Washington Post any day now is going to declare the beginning of the Next Thousand Years.
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