Showing posts with label Aztec. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aztec. Show all posts
Saturday, 16 May 2020
Coronavirus watch: was this Britain's first major epidemic?
Over the centuries after Stonehenge was built, the descendants of the people who created it largely disappeared from Britain. They were farmers of Mediterranean appearance with dark hair and olive skin.
The great stone circle was finished about 2500 BC, but examination of 150 ancient skeletons from all over the country suggests that over the next 500 years, our Mediterranean-type ancestors had dwindled to about 10 per cent of the population.
They were replaced by the 'Beaker people' who seem to have originated in Central Europe. In the absence of any evidence of a major conflict, some archaeologists suggest that they brought with them a disease or diseases to which the native people had no resistance. Some have even suggested it might have been bubonic plague, which returned with such devastating effect during the 300 years or so from 1348. (See my posts of 3 and 25 April.)
If the theory is right, it would mirror what happened to the Aztecs, the Incas and the Maya, who were conquered not so much by Spanish conquistadors as by the smallpox and other diseases they brought with them.
Labels:
Ancient Britain,
Ancient Briton,
Aztec,
Beaker,
Black Death,
conquistador,
disease,
epidemic,
Inca,
Maya,
plague,
smallpox,
Stonehenge
Saturday, 31 December 2016
How humans have tried to control storms
In Lithuania in the olden days,
they would drink beer, dance round bonfires, or sacrifice animals. In other
Slav countries, maidens would be danced to death. In the British Isles, we
burned humans and animals alive inside a great wickerwork idol (remember the cult horror film, The Wicker Man?), while the
Aztecs sacrificed children. All these things were done to try to control the
tempests which humanity has learned the hard way, can unleash immense
destruction without warning.
It must all have sounded so
primitive to those in more modern times, who tried to enlist science. So in
Central Europe in the late nineteenth century, they fired mortars in vineyards
and orchards to stop hailstorms, believing the shock waves in the atmosphere
would stop the stones forming. Great success was claimed, but scientific
experiments found the method useless.
In the twentieth century, the
Soviet Union went for a more ambitious approach, trying to protect the cotton
fields of Uzbekistan and other places from hailstorms by firing into the clouds
rockets and artillery shells carrying silver or lead iodide crystals. The idea
was to provide lots of nuclei around which stones could form, making them more
numerous but smaller, and less able to do damage.
The Russians claimed that between
1968 and 1984 they achieved 80 per cent success, but American tests were unable
to reproduce the results.
For the full story of humanity’s
attempts to control storms see my new book Storm:
Nature and Culture (Reaktion Books).
Labels:
Aztec,
Britain,
Great Britain,
hail,
Lithuania,
Russia,
Soviet Union,
storm,
Tempest,
The Wicker Man,
UK,
USA,
USSR,
Uzbekistan
Tuesday, 13 August 2013
How smallpox conquered an empire
On this day…………….492 years ago, the Spanish conquistador,
Hernan Cortes, took Tenochtitlán, now Mexico City.
Cortes was a commander of extraordinary energy and daring, and he captured the
Aztec capital with just a few hundred Spaniards, though it is often forgotten
that his army also included tens of thousands of Indians.
And he had a secret weapon more deadly than any of the arms
his men deployed so ruthlessly – smallpox. The Aztecs had no resistance to this disease introduced from Europe.
In the crowded streets of the capital, it spread like
wildfire. The victims who found themselves covered from head to foot with
agonising sores, called it the ‘great rash’. They ‘died in heaps, like bedbugs’,
wrote a missionary.
Among those who perished was the Aztecs’ leader, Cuitlahuac.
Still they held out heroically for three months, and when the Spaniards finally
entered Tenochtitlán, they found themselves walking
on the corpses of those killed by smallpox. For the full story, see A Disastrous History of the World.
* A preview of my new book, Flood, out on November 1. http://www.reaktionbooks.co.uk/reaktion/display.asp?K=e2013042214580897&m=29&dc=664
Labels:
Aztec,
conquest,
conquistador,
Cortes,
Cuitlahuac,
disease,
epidemic,
Mexico,
smallpox,
Spaniard,
Tenochtitlán
Monday, 17 May 2010
Smallpox
On this day…..261 years ago, Edward Jenner, the man who discovered the smallpox vaccine, was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire. Jenner discovered that by infecting someone with the much milder cowpox virus, you could protect them against smallpox, which had been killing an estimated 400,000 Europeans a year.
The disease had done its cataclysmic worst, though, in the New World, where native populations were completely lacking in immunity. The Spanish conquistadores terrified the Indians with their fire-spitting guns, but actually the smallpox virus was the deadliest weapon they brought.
It began in the early sixteenth century by cutting a swath through the populations of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. Then Hernan Cortes took it with him to Mexico, and when the Aztecs tried to resist him, they were cut down by the virus, and “died in heaps, like bedbugs.”
The Incas met a similar fate, with their great king, Huayna Capac, among those who died. Smallpox, helped by other imported illnesses, like mumps and measles, would reduce their numbers from seven to just one million. (See also my blog of Nov 6.)
The disease had done its cataclysmic worst, though, in the New World, where native populations were completely lacking in immunity. The Spanish conquistadores terrified the Indians with their fire-spitting guns, but actually the smallpox virus was the deadliest weapon they brought.
It began in the early sixteenth century by cutting a swath through the populations of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica and Cuba. Then Hernan Cortes took it with him to Mexico, and when the Aztecs tried to resist him, they were cut down by the virus, and “died in heaps, like bedbugs.”
The Incas met a similar fate, with their great king, Huayna Capac, among those who died. Smallpox, helped by other imported illnesses, like mumps and measles, would reduce their numbers from seven to just one million. (See also my blog of Nov 6.)
Labels:
Aztec,
Berkeley,
conquistador,
Cuba,
disease,
Dominican Republic,
epidemic,
Haiti,
Henran Cortes,
Hispaniola,
Huayna Capac,
Inca,
Jamaica,
Jenner,
Puerto Rico,
smallpox
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