Bradley Skopyk's book is an innovative social and landscape history of climate in central Mexico under Spanish rule. This was the time of the Little Ice Age—whose final chapter marked one of the wettest and strongest climate events of the Holocene—and a subsequent phase of unprecedented flooding and soil erosion.
The book offers a precise documentation of precipitation and weather events over some 300 years. To do so, Skopyk draws on a remarkable suite of methodologies and sources. They include dendrochronology, stalagmite studies, an exhaustive archival inventory of weather events, historical maps, Nahuatl etymology, and historical geographic information systems. Skopyk's results show a two-phase movement: an abnormally wet period from the conquest to the 1670s, followed by a return to a long-term climatic mean that was characterized by a more balanced alternation of wet and dry years. This new climate history revises a view that has, since the eighteenth-century studies...
