【简译】中世纪美洲的气候异常现象

2023-03-07 09:54 作者:神尾智代 0人读过 | 我要投稿

To climatologists, the period of seven to twelve centuries ago was known as a "Climate Anomaly" or a "Warm Period" (800-1300 CE). To archaeologists, it was a time of great change, a period when cultural patterns were put into place that lasted into the modern era. Although the medieval period is better known in Europe and the Old World, it was a global phenomenon. It happened in the New World, too.

对气候学家来说，七至十二世纪前的时期被称为“气候异常”或“温暖”期（公元800-1300年）。对考古学家来说，这是一个巨变时代，是一个文化模式被建立起来并持续到现代的时代。虽然中世纪时期在欧洲和旧世界更为人所知，但它是一种全球现象，这种变化也发生在新世界。

温暖时期的新世界文化

In the Mississippi valley, this was the era of the Mississippian culture. In North Mexico and the American Southwest, it encompassed the Puebloan, Hohokam, Mogollon, and early Casas Grandes cultures. In Mesoamerica, which is to say from about Culiacan, Mexico, on the Pacific coast to Tampico, Mexico, on the Gulf coast and south to Nicaragua, the era encompassed the Epi-Classic, Terminal Classic, and early Postclassic periods and included the so-called Toltec, Huastec, and Maya civilizations, among others. Whatever the names and whomever the people, all appear to have been part of a phenomenon – a cult or cults of Thunderers or Winds-that-bring-rain gods – that swept the continent over the course of 200-300 years.

在密西西比河谷，这一时期是密西西比文化的时代。在墨西哥北部和美国西南部，它包括普韦布洛文化、霍霍坎文化、莫戈隆文化和早期的大卡萨斯文化。在中美洲，即从太平洋沿岸的墨西哥库利亚坎到墨西哥湾沿岸的坦皮科，再往南到尼加拉瓜，这个时代包括史前古典时期、终结古典时期和后古典时期早期，包括所谓的托尔特克、瓦斯特克和玛雅文明等。无论名字和民族如何，他们似乎都是在 200 到 300 年的时间里在整个大陆蔓延的一种现象（一种或多种雷神崇拜或风神崇拜）的一部分。

The sweeping effects were profound, leaving lasting imprints on diverse peoples and their civilizations and establishing ways of life that were to last through the arrival of Europeans. These effects were observed by the earliest European conquistadors and colonists in the 1500s –unbeknownst to them – long after the world had moved past the medieval era. Indeed, we base some of what we think happened in the medieval era on later Spanish observations. That said, some of these earliest European intruders make poor guides. They include Hernán Cortés, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, Hernando de Soto, and Juan de Oñate. These men cared little about the native history and heritage that they were assaulting.

这些影响是深远的，在不同的民族和他们的文明中留下了持久的印记，并建立了一直持续到欧洲人到来的生活方式。在世界已经过了中世纪很久之后，16 世纪早期的欧洲征服者和定居者（他们并不知道）观察到了这些影响。事实上，我们认为中世纪发生的事情的一部分是基于后来西班牙人的观察。话虽这么说，但其中一些早期的欧洲闯入者并不是很好的向导。他们包括埃尔南·科尔特斯、弗朗西斯科·巴斯克斯·德·科罗纳多、埃尔南多·德·索托和胡安·德·奥尼亚特。这些人根本不关心本土历史和遗产。

But other European explorers, especially the four men who survived the failed Pánfilo de Narváez expedition of 1528-1536, are quite good guides. These four men, the most notable of whom was Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, crisscrossed much of the same territory covered in this book, meeting colonial-era descendants of medieval peoples who had caused many of the historic changes that gave shape to the provinces that the Spaniards later called La Florida, Nuevo Galicia, Nuevo España, and the Yucatan.

其他欧洲探险家，特别是1528-1536年潘菲洛·德·纳尔瓦埃斯探险队失败后幸存的四人，都是很好的向导。这四个人，其中最著名的是阿尔瓦·努涅斯·卡韦萨·德·巴卡，在本书所涉及的大部分地区纵横驰骋，他们遇到了殖民时代中世纪人民的后裔，也造成了许多历史性的变化，促使了西班牙人后来称之为佛罗里达、新加利西亚、新西班牙和犹加敦等省份形成。

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions, about to travel on their long journey west in 1535, had chided the Avavare people for their story of the Bad Thing, never considering that the story might have been the myth of an evil creator god – Tezcatlipoca or perhaps Xolotl – lord of the night winds or underworld, counterpart to a bearded beneficent creator god – Quetzalcoatl. Yet the Avavares and subsequent groups met by Cabeza de Vaca, Estevanico, Castillo, and Dorantes, considered the bearded foreigners to be the Children of the Sun – god-men who journeyed west. Cabeza de Vaca himself had carried seashells from group to group during his years as an itinerant middleman in the Texas interior. How often had he placed a shell up to his ear to wonder about the sounds of wind and crashing waves inside?

阿尔瓦·努涅斯·卡韦萨·德·巴卡和他的三个同伴在1535年即将踏上西行的漫长旅程时，曾责备Avavare（得克萨斯州南部的一个鲜为人知的美洲印第安人部落）关于坏事的故事，却从未考虑过这个故事可能是一个邪恶的创世神（Tezcatlipoca或 Xólotl）夜空或冥界的主宰，与一个长着胡子的仁慈的创世神（Quetzalcóatl）相对应。然而，Avavare认为这些长着胡子的外国人，如阿尔瓦·努涅斯·卡韦萨·德·巴卡、埃斯特瓦尼科、卡斯蒂略和多兰特斯等他们所遇到的外来者，是太阳之子，即向西旅行的神人。阿尔瓦·努涅斯·卡韦萨·德·巴卡本人在德克萨斯内陆地区担任旅行中间人期间，曾在各个团体之间携带贝壳。他曾多少次把贝壳放在耳边，想知道里面的风声和海浪声？

Pánfilo de Narváez 和 Cabeza de Vaca 的远征（1527-36 年）

神庙和纪念碑

Now, consider the prominence and number of such shells, along with circular shrines, at a number of medieval-era archaeological places: Aztec, Cahokia, Chaco, Cherry Valley, Chichen Itza, Crenshaw, Cuicuilco, Calixtlahuaca, Emerald, George C. Davis, Ixtlan del Rio, Las Flores, Los Guachimontónes, Paquime, Tamtoc, Tenochtitlan, Trempealeau, and Tula Chico. Those shells meant something profound to descendants of peoples who lived through the Medieval Climate Anomaly. And those shells were often associated with wind, water, and circular temples, shrines, and pyramids that were frequently, in turn, paired with square platforms, buildings, or pyramids. They were connected to temples, sacred fires, and the realm of the dead by elevated causeways sometimes to or through water and occasionally with reference to a great water-bringer spirit – the Moon. And they were connected to or through upright poles and twisted ropes that reached up into the sky to the winds and clouds from whence lightning flashed.

现在让我们考虑一下这种贝壳以及圆形圣殿在中世纪时期一系列考古遗址中的重要性和数量：阿兹特克、卡霍基亚、查科、樱桃谷、奇琴伊察、克伦肖、奎奎尔科、Calixtlahuaca, Esmeralda, George C. Davis, Ixtlán del Río, Las Flores, Los Guachimontónes, Paquime, Tamtoc, Tenochtitlán, Trempealeau 和 Tula Chico。（没找到中译）这些贝壳对经历过中世纪气候异常的人们的后代来说意义深远。而这些贝壳往往与风、水和圆形的寺庙、神殿和金字塔有关，而这些又通常与方形平台、建筑物或金字塔配对。它们与神庙、圣火和亡灵界通过高架通道相连，有时与水相连或穿过水，偶尔还会提到一个伟大的承载水的精灵：月亮。它们与直立的柱子和扭曲的绳索相连，这些柱子和绳索伸向天空，直达风和云，闪电从那里闪过。

Obviously, the various cultures north and south of the Pánuco developed on their own and were not all the same. Yet the peoples of these various regional traditions still communicated with each other, in one way or another, sharing certain understandings of the world around them, adopting the bundled practices of their neighbors near and far, and arriving in the modern era as distinctive peoples who nevertheless shared deeply enmeshed concepts and engrained practices. Circular shrines and monuments came to be central to the religious and urban complexes of the people in the volatile climatic regime of the Medieval Warm Period. Members of surrounding communities, one might presume, came to water shrines routinely to pray for rain or to be healed.

显然，帕努科南北各种文化各自发展，并不完全相同。然而，这些不同地区的传统人民仍然以这样或那样的方式相互交流，分享关于周围世界的某些概念。他们采用远近邻居的带状实践，并作为独特的民族来到现代，分享了深刻交织的概念和根深蒂固的实践经验。在中世纪温暖时期气候变化无常的城镇中，圆形圣殿和纪念碑占据了宗教和城市综合体的中心位置。我们可以推测，周围社区的成员经常到水神庙祈求雨水或得到治疗。

For farmers, there would have been very little more important in the world than healing the body, soul, community, and cosmos. These were the laborers who did the tilling and planting, the tending and harvesting, the cleaning and processing, and the storage and hauling of all the foodstuffs without which no city could have existed. Their fields were subject to floods and droughts and their bodies were subject to the aches and pains and illnesses and injuries of the sort that laborers are always disproportionately prone. They understood the plants they grew and the animals that might raid their fields. But as for how to be healed or how to control the weather – these were the jobs of shamans, priests, and elites who had access to the gods and who understood the cosmos.

对于农民来说，世界上几乎没有比治愈身体、灵魂、社区和宇宙更重要的事情了。他们是从事耕作和种植、照料和收获、清洗和加工以及储存和运输所有食品的劳动者，没有这些，任何城市都不可能长存。田地受到水灾和旱灾的影响，人们的身体受到疼痛和病痛的影响，而劳动者总是更容易受到这些影响。他们了解自己种植的植物和可能袭击他们田地的动物。但至于如何被治愈或如何控制天气，这些都是萨满、祭司和能接触到神灵并了解宇宙的精英们的工作。

Farmers needed them. They needed the blessings and healing power of the spirit world. They needed to get right with the gods. And so growers, pilgrims, and the curious from far away came into the sacred shrines and the cities that grew up about them. They carried in their ailing aunts and sick cousins, fathers, and mothers. They came into the shrines to pray to the gods, celebrate life, drink the healing waters, and be blessed inside the steamy dark chambers. In the process, the histories of Mesoamericans, Chichimecs, Caddos, Cahokians, Chacoans, and so many more to the north became intertwined.

农民们需要他们。他们需要精神世界的祝福和治愈能力。他们需要与众神保持一致。因此，种植者、朝圣者和来自远方的好奇者来到了神圣的圣地和围绕它们生长的城市。他们带着生病的姨妈和表妹、父亲和母亲。他们来到神殿，向神灵祈祷，庆祝生命，喝下治愈的圣水，并在蒸汽缭绕的暗室中接受祝福。在此过程中，中美洲人、奇奇梅克人、卡多人、卡霍基亚人、查科人以及许多来自北方的人的历史交织在一起。

None of these original indigenous cultures, with their overlapping philosophies and ontologies, developed in a vacuum. Rather, across North America, history swirled around medieval climatic shifts like the wind in a conch shell. If you listen carefully, you can still hear it. The atmosphere and the people were one, and so climate happened through people, and climate history was human history. It is the central lesson of America's medieval period and its gods of Thunder, from the Maya westward into Central Mexico, northward into the American Southwest and southern Plains, and, finally, up the Mississippi.

这些原始的土著文化，及其重叠的哲学和本体论都不是凭空发展起来的。相反，在整个北美，历史就像海螺壳里的风一样，围绕着中世纪的气候转变而旋转。如果你仔细听，还是能听出来的。大气与人是一体的，气候是通过人产生的，气候的历史就是人类的历史。这是中美洲中世纪时期及其《雷霆之神》(Gods of Thunder)的核心要点。从玛雅向西进入墨西哥中部，向北进入美国西南部和南部平原，最后到达密西西比河上游。