Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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Graveyard of Empires
To Protect Your Rivers, Protect Your Mountains
emperor yu (china)
in the early 1840s new york lawyer, adventurer, and amateur archaeologist
John Lloyd Stephens found the ruins of more than forty ancient
cities in dense Central American jungle. After excavating at Copán in
Guatemala, traveling north to Mexico’s ruined city of Pelenque, and returning
to the Yucatán, Stephens realized that the jungle hid a lost civilization.
His revelation shocked the American public. Native American
civilizations rivaling those of the Middle East didn’t fit into the American
vision of civilizing a primeval continent.
A century and a half after Stephens’s discovery, I stood atop the Great
Pyramid at Tikal and relived his realization that the surrounding hills were
ancient buildings. The topography itself outlined a lost city, reclaimed by
huge trees, roots locked around piles of hieroglyphic-covered rubble.
Temple-top islands rising above the forest canopy were the only sign of an
ancient tropical empire.
With different characters and contexts, Tikal’s story has been repeated
many times around the world—in the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The
capital of many a dead civilization lives off tourism. Did soil degradation
destroy these early civilizations? Not directly. But time and again it left
societies increasingly vulnerable to hostile neighbors, internal sociopolitical
disruption, and harsh winters or droughts.
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