31/1/2015

650-Year Drought Triggered Ancient City's Abandonment

650-Year Drought Triggered

Ancient City's Abandonment
by Laura Geggel, Staff Writer | January 30, 2015 01:54pm ET

A once-thriving Mesoamerican
metropolis dried up about 1,000
years ago when below-average
rainfall triggered centuries-long
droughts that largely prompted
people to abandon the city for
greener opportunities, a new study
finds.

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A lake near Cantona where

researchers collected sediment
samples to learn about the area's history of
drought between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1150.

Scientists have long debated whether

it was drought or cultural forces that
led to the abandonment of Cantona,
Credit: Tripti Bhattacharya
a once-fortified city located just east
View full size image
of modern-day Mexico City. Few
details were known about its past
climate, which prompted researchers to take a closer look at the weather
conditions that affected the pre-Columbian city in Mesoamerica.
In its heyday, about 90,000 people lived in Cantona, which is located in a dry
volcanic basin. The area provided vast amounts of valuable obsidian, volcanic
glass used for trade and making sharp tools for hunting and farming. But
people deserted the city between A.D. 900 and A.D. 1050, research shows.
[History's 10 Most Overlooked Mysteries]
To investigate why, geographers assessed the climate before and after
Cantona's collapse. They took sediment cores and samples from Aljojuca, a
lake about 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the city.
As a closed lake basin, Aljojuca enabled the scientists to track the past
climate in the region. The researchers examined the relationship between
different oxygen isotopes, or variants of the element, in the water, and
determined how much precipitation and evaporation was taking place at the
lake. The ratio of the isotopes was high, indicating the area had drier
summers, the scientists said. Analyses of other compounds in the sediment
samples yielded similar results.
Overall, Cantona still had wet summers and dry winters, but its regularmonsoon
season was disturbed by frequent long-term droughts, which likely harmed the
area's crops and water supply, the researchers said. Moreover, the droughts

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31/1/2015

650-Year Drought Triggered Ancient City's Abandonment

lasted hundreds of years.

A 650-year period of frequent droughts plagued the area from about A.D. 500
to about A.D. 1150, they found. This dry period wasn't isolated, but part of a
period of droughts in modern-day Mexico's highlands that lasted from about
200 B.C. until A.D. 1300, just before the Aztec empiretook power.
"The decline of Cantonaoccurred during this dry interval, and we conclude that
climate change probably played a role, at least towards the end of the city's
existence," lead researcher Tripti Bhattacharya, a graduate student of
geography at the University of California, Berkeley,said in a statement.
Yet, Cantona's population actually grew during the early part of the dry period.
It's possible that political turmoil and droughts elsewhere drove more people to
the fortified city, Bhattacharya said.
"In a sense the area became important because of the increased frequency of
drought," Roger Byrne, an associate professor of geography at the University
of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. "But when the droughts continued
on such a scale, the subsistence base for the whole area changed and people
just had to leave. The city was abandoned."
The study was published online Jan. 26 in the journal the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences.

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