The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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caltrek
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Forgotten Ruins of 'Monumental' Amazonian Settlements Discovered in Bolivian Jungle
by Clare Watson
May 25, 2022

Introduction:
(Science Alert) The sprawling ruins of Amazonian settlements once home to an Indigenous agriculturalist society with a penchant for cosmology have been uncovered in the Bolivian jungle, hidden beneath seemingly impenetrable vegetation.

The 26 sites, roughly half of which were previously unknown to archaeologists, are yet another example of how the Amazon region was home to large, longstanding settlements and complex ancient societies before the Spanish invasion decimated the Americas.

"Our results put to rest arguments that western Amazonia was sparsely populated in pre-Hispanic times" and enrich existing evidence that the Casarabe culture had a "highly integrated, continuous and dense settlement system," write archaeologist Heiko Prümers of the German Archaeological Institute and colleagues in a new study.

Using remote laser scanners mounted on helicopters, the team of mostly European archaeologists scanned six areas in the heartland of the ancient Casarabe culture that developed between AD 500 and 1400 in what is now northern Bolivia.

The sprawling network of settlements they uncovered under dense forest represents a type of low-density urbanism, the first of this kind found in tropical lowlands of South America, featuring numerous elaborate ceremonial constructions including stepped platforms and U-shaped mounds, all orientated to the north-northwest.
Read more here: https://www.sciencealert.com/ruins-of-m ... ian-jungle
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Delightful video about peasant food during the middle ages. Those pesky peasants probably had better than us as far as food is concerned. The channel is great, covering many topics about the medieval period.

And, as always, bye bye.
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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R8Z wrote: Fri May 27, 2022 3:44 am Delightful video about peasant food during the middle ages. Those pesky peasants probably had better than us as far as food is concerned. The channel is great, covering many topics about the medieval period.

They lived a very hard life unless they bumped up in rank but it seems the eating was good. Remember that in Europe a lot of White people were peasants for centuries though I imagine there was care for all in the fiefdom because how the heck would a lot of things run including building castles? As rough as it may have been there seems to be some sort of organization they had back then.
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Romans ventured deeper into Wales than thought, road discovery shows
Sun 5 Jun 2022

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The awe-inspiring beauty of the Preseli Hills and the surrounding wild moorlands have long drawn visitors to north Pembrokeshire in Wales. Now an archaeologist has found evidence that even the Romans were drawn to the area, with the discovery of an ancient road showing they travelled farther west across Britain than previously thought.

Dr Mark Merrony, a Roman specialist, tutor at Oxford University and “a native of Pembrokeshire”, said the road had been completely missed. “This thing is just extraordinary. I’m astonished,” he said.

“I think they’ll go crazy in Wales over this because it’s pushing the Roman presence much more across Pembrokeshire. There’s this perception that the Romans didn’t go very far in Wales, but actually they were all over Wales.”

He said antiquarians in the late 17th and early 19th centuries had embraced the existence of a Roman road and it had been marked on 19th-century Ordnance Survey maps. “But the idea was then rejected and removed from those maps,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... stract.com
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Mystery of Black Death’s origins solved, say researchers

Wed 15 Jun 2022 16.00 BST

Researchers believe they have solved the nearly 700-year-old mystery of the origins of the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic in recorded history, which swept through Europe, Asia and north Africa in the mid-14th century.

At least tens of millions of people died when bubonic plague tore across the continents, probably by spreading along trade routes. Despite intense efforts to uncover the source of the outbreak, the lack of firm evidence has left the question open.

“We have basically located the origin in time and space, which is really remarkable,” said Prof Johannes Krause at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. “We found not only the ancestor of the Black Death, but the ancestor of the majority of the plague strains that are circulating in the world today.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... e-pandemic


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Ancient Stalagmites Point to a Massive Drought that Upturned Sixth Century Arabia
by Allison Parshall
June 21, 2022

Introduction:
(Inverse) STEPPING INSIDE AL HOOTA CAVE is like entering another world. The two-million-year-old structure lies at the foot of Oman’s tallest mountain and houses underground lakes teeming with blind, pale fish that have adapted to the dark environment. Massive stalagmites rise from the ground toward stalactites that stretch down from the ceiling.

These pointed rock formations, together called speleothems, create a record of the rainfall that occurred outside the cave for millennia. By studying their growth, scientists have found evidence of a 6th-century drought that may have toppled the nearby kingdom of Himyar.

WHAT’S NEW — In a paper published last week in Science, researchers used radiometric dating to chart the historic rainfall in the southern Arabian Peninsula. The team identified a significant drought that likely occurred from around the year 500 to 530 CE, coinciding with the demise of the powerful Himyarite Kingdom in what is today called Yemen. This drought may have seriously impacted the course of history, the authors say, including the rise of Islam in the region soon after.

“We have strong evidence that it was one of the driest periods of the last 10,000 years,” study co-author Dominik Fleitmann tells Inverse. Fleitmann is a geologist and paleoclimatologist at the University of Basel in Switzerland.
Conclusion:
Still, climate plays an important role in shaping our world. “It's very important to recognize climate and the environment as a major force in how our history has occurred,” Trinity College’s Akers says, but we should not underestimate or forget the role of humans in shaping and responding to it.
Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/signif ... y-arabia
Last edited by caltrek on Wed Jul 20, 2022 5:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Although a lot of this (see below) deals with details of the history of India, I think there are also lessons to be learned about a balanced treatment of history in English speaking countries like the United States. It is always dangerous to massively ignore the transgressions of one group simply because they are in the majority or otherwise exercise power over school curriculum.

Historian DN Jha Argues that Buddhist Shrines Were ‘Massively Destroyed’ by Brahmanical Rulers
by Ajaz Ashraf
June 19, 2022

Introduction:
(Janata Weekly) Historian DN Jha says that his new book Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History aims to challenge the depiction of the “ancient period of Indian history as a golden age marked by social harmony devoid of any religious violence”. This purported era of peace, he says, enables Hindutva ideologues to “portray the middle ages as … a reign of terror unleashed by the Muslim rulers on Hindus”.

The book says, “Central to (Hindutva) perception is the belief that Muslim rulers indiscriminately demolished Hindu temples and broke Hindu idols. They relentlessly propagate the canard that 60,000 Hindu temples were demolished during Muslim rule, though there is hardly any credible evidence for the destruction of more than 80 of them.”

There is no doubt that religious sects in ancient India were accommodative of each other. But it is just as true that Brahminical sects “bore huge animosity towards the two heterodox religions, Buddhism and Jainism”, Jha writes. This rancour resulted in attacks and the appropriation of Buddhist and Jain sacred places.

Presenting what he calls “a limited survey of the desecration, destruction and appropriation of Buddhist stupas, monasteries and other structures by Brahminical forces”, Jha says, “Evidence for such destruction dates as far back as the end of the reign of Ashoka, who is credited with making Buddhism a world religion.”

These facts seem to be at odds with India’s school-level history textbooks, which have been written – at least until recently – to promote what Delhi University professor Upinder Singh in her recent book Political Violence in Ancient India described as “the idealised Nehru model of the ancient Indian past…one in which Buddhism, Ashoka, nonviolence, and cosmopolitanism had a pride of place”. Hindutva ideologues have exploited this myth to portray the iconoclasm of Muslim rulers as a total reversal of India’s civilisational norms. Implicitly, therefore, Against the Grain highlights the problems of writing history, especially for schoolchildren.
Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/buddhist-shr ... n-dn-jha/
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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World’s oldest trees reveal the largest solar storm in history

June 29, 2022

While humanity reckons with many problems here on Earth — war, political turmoil, an ongoing pandemic, all alongside the energy, climate, and water crises — it’s important to remember just how relentless the Universe can be. While earthquakes, tornadoes, volcanoes, hurricanes and other natural disasters haven’t exactly ceased in the meantime, there’s a looming threat for which we’re completely unprepared: a solar storm. Without any mitigations, widespread electrical fires and power station failures could come with damages costing trillions of dollars, impacting the lives of of billions.

Historically, the largest recorded solar event occurred back in 1859: the Carrington event. But more than a millennium prior to that, an even stronger cosmic event struck Earth. We know this because, back in the years spanning 774-775, there was a tremendous spike in the presence of carbon-14 in Earth’s atmosphere, and the evidence is found in tree rings all across the world. After a full decade investigating the possible causes of this spike, the scientific conclusion we’ve reached is that the Sun was to blame. A solar storm from more than 1200 years ago may have been the most powerful one recorded in natural history. The Earth, as a result, may be at an even greater risk from a worst-case solar storm than anyone thought possible.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang ... lar-storm/


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caltrek
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Climate, Conflict, and the Prehistoric Mayans
July 19, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) An extended period of turmoil in the prehistoric Maya city of Mayapan, in the Yucatan region of Mexico, was marked by population declines, political rivalries and civil conflict. Between 1441 and 1461 CE the strife reached an unfortunate crescendo — the complete institutional collapse and abandonment of the city. This all occurred during a protracted drought.

Coincidence? Not likely, finds new research by anthropologist and professor Douglas Kennett of UC Santa Barbara.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, lead author Kennett and collaborators in the fields of archaeology, history, geography and earth science suggest that drought may in fact have stoked the civil conflict that begat violence, which in turn led to the institutional instabilities that precipitated Mayapan’s collapse. This transdisciplinary work, the researchers said, “highlights the importance of understanding the complex relationships between natural and social systems, especially when evaluating the role of climate change in exacerbating internal political tensions and factionalism in areas where drought leads to food insecurity.”

“We found complex relationships between climate change and societal stability/instability on the regional level,” Kennett said in an interview. “Drought-induced civil conflict had a devastating local impact on the integrity of Mayapan’s state institutions that were designed to keep social order. However, the fragmentation of populations at Mayapan resulted in population and societal reorganization that was highly resilient for a hundred years until the Spanish arrived on the shores of the Yucatan.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/959306 and here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-31522-x
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Re: The Middle Ages (500 – 1499 AD)

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Study: Сollapse of ancient Mayan capital linked to drought
https://phys.org/news/2022-08-collapse- ... inked.html
by Bethany Bump, University at Albany
Prolonged drought likely helped to fuel civil conflict and the eventual political collapse of Mayapan, the ancient capital city of the Maya on the Yucatán Peninsula, suggests a new study in Nature Communications that was published with the help of a University at Albany archaeologist.

Mayapan served as the capital to some 20,000 Maya people in the 13th through mid-15th centuries but collapsed and was abandoned after a rival political faction, the Xiu, massacred the powerful Cocom family. Extensive historical records date this collapse to sometime between 1441 and 1461.

But new evidence shows drought in the century prior may have played a larger role in the city's demise than was previously known. The study authors note this is relevant today as humans grapple with a future of increased climate change.

Marilyn Masson, an archaeologist and professor and chair of UAlbany's Department of Anthropology, helped design and is a co-author of the study, which was assisted by an international team of interdisciplinary researchers. They studied historical documents for records of violence and examined human remains from that area and time period for signs of traumatic injury.

Masson, who serves as principal investigator for the Proyecto Económico de Mayapan, said she and the team found shallow mass graves and evidence of brutal massacre at monumental structures across the city.
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