Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America by Timothy R. Pauketat (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America by Timothy R. Pauketat
• James F. Brooks

Gods of Thunder: How Climate Change, Travel, and Spirituality Reshaped Precolonial America. By Timothy R. Pauketat. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 330. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-764510-9.)

I have long assigned Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación y Comentarios (1542) in my early America survey courses to provide to students a firsthand glimpse, however culturally biased, of the Indigenous world that would soon be convulsed by European invaders. Yet I never thought to employ that narrative as Timothy R. Pauketat does here: to ask, if four lost foreigners, lacking local languages and without any knowledge of the regional landscape, could traverse some 2,400 miles across the southern reaches of North America, how many Indigenous sojourners, traders, teachers, and preachers might have traveled vastly greater distances to effect changes in ritual practices, architecture, social organization, and world-building in the millennia preceding 1492? North American archaeology, long hostile to diffusionist notions of cultural change (in no small part inspired by nationalist sentiments that sought to downplay cultural influences from Mexico and Central America), now faces a challenge from bold thinkers like Mississippian specialist Pauketat and his southwestern saddle-mate Stephen Lekson, famous for his provocation, which Pauketat quotes, that scholars of ancient America proceed on an assumption that “‘Everyone knew everything!’” (p. 28).

Pauketat situates his argument in the “Medieval Climate Anomaly,” an unusually warm and wet period (800–1300 CE) in the Northern Hemisphere that correlated with the explosion of social complexity and inequality in Europe and North America. In the latter, agricultural productivity soared, urbanization followed, and complex socioreligious systems evolved to manage the “Wind-that-Brings-Rain” deities who, for Pauketat, are foundational to spiritual complexes as separate in distance and time as Mayan cenote sacrifices, Hopi Katsina rituals, Mississippian mound-top sweat baths, and Lakota Sun Dances (p. 9). These deities were “historically linked to one another, much the way that human beings were, and are, intimately entangled in a global evapotranspiration cycle: clouds produce rain and snow that lead to both groundwater and water bodies that relentlessly evaporate, condense in the atmosphere, and appear as clouds once again” (p. 9). For all their discrete cultural expressions, therefore, the many thousands of Indigenous polities of the Americas (Northern Hemisphere, in this case) constituted a mutually comprehensible, if not politically unified, cultural world.

This claim is a bold provocation, couched in energetic prose and cast in a deeply informed sweep across ancient North America that is an enchanting, if not scientifically convincing, read. Beginning with the “Temples of Wind and Rain” that dominated Mexico and the ancient U.S. Southwest, shifting to the “ballcourt” economy of the Hohokam in modern Arizona, ranging south into the Maya Yucatan, then reversing Cabeza de Vaca’s journey by stepping northeastward “Across the Chichimec Sea” into the Caddoan heartland, [End Page 399] Pauketat strides ever closer to his own turf, the eye-popping city of Cahokia and its vast spheres of cultural influence (chaps. 1, 5). Each of the book’s twelve chapters concludes with the author’s recommendations for visiting publicly accessible archaeological sites, which themselves provoke by their unexpectedness. For instance, chapter 5 recommends we visit the circular pyramids of Los Guachimontónes, in Teuchitlan, Jalisco; or the Zona Arqueología Cuicuilco, in Tlalpan, Mexico City, site of a circular pyramid nearly buried by lava flows from an eruption of Xitle volcano; and (yes) the Wounded Knee Memorial at the Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota, obliquely tied to the former sites by the circular movements of the Lakota Ghost Dancers who were gunned down by the U.S. Seventh Cavalry in December 1890.

Southerners (including descendant communities) will be disappointed that Nanih Waiyna, Kituwah, Kolomoki, Moundville, Ocmulgee, and Etowah Mound cities receive no mention. Perhaps they are peripheral in Pauketat’s mind to the Cahokia metropolis. In contrast, Poverty Point, Louisiana, an Archaic (3000 BP) pre-agricultural complex with stunning geometry and earthworks almost certainly designed with astronomy in mind rather than rain, does.

However much it may...