The conventional view, analogous to the claim that Madagascar's elephant birds and New Zealand's moas died out from natural changes in climate, attributes the abandonment of Chaco Canyon to a drought. However, a different interpretation emerges from the work of paleo-botanists Julio Betancourt, Thomas Van Devender, and their colleagues, who used an ingenious technique to decipher changes in Chaco vegetation through time. Their method relied on the little rodents called packrats, which gather plants and other materials into shelters ('middens') that they eventually abandon after fifty or a hundred years but that remain well preserved under desert conditions. The plants can be identified centuries later, and the midden can be dated by radiocarbon techniques. Thus, each midden is virtually a time capsule of the local vegetation.
By this method, Betancourt and Van Devender were able to reconstruct the following course of events. At the time that the Chaco pueblos were erected, they were not surrounded by barren desert but by pinyon and juniper woodland, with ponderosa pine forests nearby. This discovery at once solves the mystery of where the firewood and timber came from, and disposes of the apparent paradox of an advanced civilization rising from barren desert. As occupation continued at Chaco, however, the woodland and forest were cleared until the environment became the treeless wasteland that it remains today. The Indians were then having to go over ten miles to get firewood, and over twenty-five miles to get pine logs. When the pine forests had been felled, they built an elaborate road system to haul spruce and fir logs from mountain slopes over fifty miles away, relying on nothing more than their own muscle power. In addition, the Anasazi had solved the problems of agriculture in a dry environment by building irrigation systems to concentrate available water into valley bottoms. As deforestation caused progressively increasing erosion and water runoff, and as irrigation channels gradually dug gullies into the ground, the water table may finally have dropped below the level of the Anasazi fields, making irrigation without pumps impossible. Thus, while drought may have made some contribution to the Anasazi abandonment of Chaco Canyon, a self-inflicted ecological disaster was also a major factor. Our remaining example of pro-industrial habitat destruction illuminates the gradual geographic shift in the power centre of ancient western civilizations. Recall that the first centre of power and innovation was the Mideast where so many crucial developments arose- agriculture, animal domestication, writing, imperial states, battle chariots and others. Ascendancy shifted between Assyria, Babylon, Persia and occMionaUy Egypt or Turkey, but remained in or near the Mideast. With the overthrow of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great, ascendancy moved finally westward, at first to Greece, then to Rome, and later to western and northern Europe. Why did the Mideast, Greece, and Rome in turn lose their primacy? (The transient current importance ot the
Mideast, resting as it does on the single resource of oil, merely emphasizes by contrast the region's modern weakness in other respects.) Why do modern superpowers include the US and Russia, Germany and England, Japan and China, but no longer Greece and Persia? This geographic shift in power is too big and lasting a pattern to have arisen by accident. A plausible hypothesis attributes it to each ancient centre of civilization in turn ruining its resource base. The Mideast and Mediterranean were not always the degraded landscape that they appear today. In ancient times much of this area was a lush, fertile mosaic of wooded hills and fertile valleys. Thousands of years of deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, and valley siltation converted this heartland of Western civilization into the relatively dry, barren, infertile landscape that predominates today. Archaeological surveys of ancient Greece have revealed several cycles of population growth alternating with population crashes and local abandonment of human settlements. In the growth phases, terracing and dams initially protected the landscape until felling of forests, clearing of steep slopes for agriculture, overgrazing by too many livestock, and planting of crops at too short intervals overwhelmed the system. The result each time was massive erosion of the hills, flooding of the valleys, and the collapse of local human society. One such event coincided with (and may have caused) the otherwise mysterious collapse of Greece's glorious Mycenean civilization, after which Greece fell back for several centuries into a dark age of illiteracy.
The support for this view of ancient environmental destruction comes from sources such as contemporary accounts and archaeological evidence. Yet a few sequences of photographs would constitute more decisive tests than all that anecdotal evidence combined. If we had snapshots of the same Greek hillside taken at thousand-year intervals, we could identify the plants, measure the ground cover, and calculate the shift from forest to goat-proof shrubs. We could thereby put numbers on the extent of environmental degradation. Enter middens to the rescue again. While the Mideast does not have packrats, it does have rabbitsized, marmot-like animals called hyraxes that build middens in the same way as packrats. (Surprisingly, the closest living relatives of hyraxes may be elephants.) Three Arizona scientists—"atricia Fall, Cynthia Lindquist, and Steven Falconer—studied hyrax middens at Jordan's famous lost city of Petra, which typifies the paradox °i ancient Western civilization. Petra is now especially familiar to movie-going aficionados of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, whose turn Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade shows Scan Connery and Harrison Ford searching for the Holy Grail in Petra's magnificent rock tombs and temples amidst the desert sand. Anyone who sees those scenes of Petra must wonder how such a wealthy city could have arisen and supported itself in such a bleak landscape. In fact, there was already a Neolithic village near the site of Petra before 7000 BC, and farming and herding appeared there soon after. Under the Nabataean kingdom, of which it was the capital, Petra thrived as a commercial centre controlling trade between Europe, Arabia, and the Orient. The city grew even larger and richer under Roman, then Byzantine, control. Yet it was subsequently abandoned and so completely forgotten that its ruins were not rediscovered until 1812. What caused Petra's collapse?
Each hyrax midden from Petra yielded remains of up to 100 plant species, and the habitat prevailing when each midden's owner was alive could be calibrated by comparing pollen proportions in the midden with those in modern habitats. From the middens, the following trajectory was reconstructed for the degradation of Petra's environment. Petra lies in an area of dry Mediterranean climate not unlike that of the wooded mountains behind my home in Los Angeles. The original vegetation would have been a woodland dominated by oak and pistachio trees. By Roman and Byzantine times, most of the trees had been felled, and the surroundings had been degraded to an open steppe, as expressed in the fact that only eighteen per cent of midden pollen came from trees, the rest from low plants. (For comparison, trees contribute forty to eighty-five per cent of the pollen in modern Mediterranean forests, eighteen per cent in forest steppes.) By 900 AD, a few centuries after Byzantine control of the Petra area ended, two-thirds of the remaining trees had disappeared. Even shrubs, herbs, and grasses had declined, converting the environment into the desert that we see now. Surviving trees today have their lower branches pruned off by goats and are scattered on goat-proof cliffs or in groves protected from goats.
Juxtaposing these data from hyrax middens with archaeological and literary data yields the following interpretation. Deforestation from Neolithic to Imperial times was driven by the clearing of land for agriculture, browsing by sheep and goats, gathering of firewood, and wood needs for house construction. Even Neolithic houses not only were supported By massive timbers but also consumed up to thirteen tons of firewood per house to make the plaster for the walls and floor. The Imperial population explosion quickened the pace of forest destruction and overgrazing. Elaborate systems of channels, pipes, and cisterns were needed to collect and store water for the orchards and city.