Key
At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
Drag to move · scroll to zoom · click a country or marker
To move the map on a touch screen, drag it. Pinch to zoom, or double-tap to zoom in.
How do people make a living when the climate makes their surroundings difficult to inhabit? In the North Atlantic, Norse farmers and sailors traveled west from Norway during the warm centuries, establishing farms in Iceland and Greenland and reaching North America. They later faced the cold of the Little Ice Age. In central Mexico, the Mexica built Tenochtitlan on islands in a lake basin with no outlet. Their city may have held 200,000 people, and they built dikes, aqueducts and raised fields to contend with salt, flood and frost.
These two histories raise a question about innovation: why did some practices last while settlements or states ended, and others failed? Twelve chapters follow the cases through evidence from ice cores, lake sediments, tree rings, sagas and painted codices. Each kind of evidence has its own reach and limits. The epilogue brings the cases together for the IB Paper 1 inquiry into climate and innovation.
On the maps, red marks the Norse world in the North Atlantic and the Triple Alliance in Mexico. Blue marks the Indigenous peoples of the north and the states that opposed the Alliance. Switch among three maps, move the timeline across seven centuries, and open any territory for its dossier. When you can read both landscapes, try the Field Exam.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.