DeepSummary
The podcast features an interview with Timothy Pauketat, an archaeologist and professor, discussing his new book 'Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America'. The book explores how Indigenous peoples of Medieval North and Central America confronted climate change during the Medieval Warm Period from AD 800-1300.
Pauketat guides readers through ancient paths walked by Indigenous people a millennium ago, following the footsteps of priests, pilgrims, traders, and farmers who took great journeys and migrated long distances. He highlights remarkable parallels between pre-contact American civilizations, focusing on a religious movement that swept Mesoamerica, the Southwest, and the Mississippi valley due to climate change.
The book features key archaeological sites and includes a guide to visiting these sites. Pauketat argues that climate change impacted the spread of ideas, architecture, and material culture across the continent, and that natural forces played a significant role in shaping human history during this period.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Climate change during the Medieval Warm Period had a significant impact on the spread of religious movements, architectural styles, and material culture across Indigenous civilizations in North and Central America.
- Natural forces like wind, water, and weather played a significant role in shaping human history, even if people were not always consciously aware of their effects.
- Archaeologists need to move beyond regionalism and traditional assumptions about economic motivations driving change, and instead consider broader narratives and the role of environmental factors.
- Studying how past societies confronted climate change can provide insights for understanding and preparing for contemporary climate change.
- Pauketat's book takes a unique approach by combining archaeological evidence with Indigenous knowledge and narratives to explore the impact of climate change on pre-colonial America.
- The book highlights the importance of considering the experiential aspects of climate change, not just the material remains, to understand how people perceived and responded to environmental changes.
- Interdisciplinary and cross-regional approaches are necessary to understand the complex interactions between climate, culture, and human societies in the past and present.
- Archaeological sites and evidence are increasingly threatened by modern climate change, emphasizing the urgency of investigating and preserving this knowledge.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Climate change happens differently in different regions or parts of the world. And that's super important to appreciate so that we can kind of use the past then as some kind of gauge to think about the future.“ by Timothy Pauketat
- “I think archaeologists for far too long have thought, and maybe historians as well, give people a bit too much credit in terms of being intentional actors who know what they're doing all the time and then achieve the outcomes that they're trying to achieve.“ by Timothy Pauketat
- “Whether or not that, you know, it's an organic, you know, I mean, an organism, it's still something in motion. That people has effects on people, and whether they know it or not, it has effects on us.“ by Timothy Pauketat
- “We have to stop being regionalists and also stop thinking that all change in the past is driven by trade. Somehow an economic motivation is driving all of this change.“ by Timothy Pauketat
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Episode Information
New Books in Environmental Studies
Marshall Poe
4/27/23