Key
Modern coastlines; historical borders are approximate, drawn from scholarly maps. Ice bands are schematic summer limits. The basin’s lakes are reconstructed for c. 1519.
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Two societies, two demanding environments, one question: how did people innovate to live with a difficult climate, and why did some of their inventions last while others failed? In the North Atlantic, Norse farmers and sailors rode the warm centuries west from Norway to Iceland, Greenland and North America, and then met the cold of the Little Ice Age. In the Basin of Mexico, the Mexica built a city of perhaps 200,000 people on islands in a lake with no outlet, and engineered dikes, aqueducts and raised fields against salt, flood and frost.
Twelve chapters follow both cases, using ice cores, lake muds, tree rings, sagas and painted codices as evidence, and the epilogue compares them on the IB Paper 1 question of climate and innovation. 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 stood against the Alliance. Switch between three maps, scrub the timeline across seven centuries, open any territory for its dossier, and sit the Field Exam when you can read both landscapes.
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This is one of twenty-one atlases — the ★ at the top left returns to the library at any time.