Environmental Collapse of the Nasca

According to a little press release I received late last week, David Beresford-Jones from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at Cambridge has been leading a team investigating the environmental impacts of agriculture on the Nasca civilization in Peru.

Ancient huarango in Usaca, the last old-growth forest fragment on the south coast of Peru. Researchers have found evidence that the Nasca cleared areas such as this to devastating effect. Photo by McDonald Institute

The Nasca, who are best known for the Nasca Lines, those mysterious gigantic geoglyphs of spiders and birds and geometric lines created in the Peruvian deserts, lived between about 1-750 AD, when their society collapsed into chaos. The recent study is said to show that the Nasca cleared the Ica Valley forest of huarango trees to make way for crops, including cotton and maize. Beresford-Jones' team reports that cutting down the huarango tree had an unintended effect on the arid landscape: that the deforestation damaged soil fertility and made the Nasca vulnerable to El Nino-style storms, and ultimately put an end to the Nasca society.

The report has been published in Latin American Antiquity, and I haven't seen it yet, so I'll just stop there and pass along some late-breaking news stories on the topic.

• About.com's Guide to the Nazca Civilization
• Nasca Lines

News Stories

• Beresford-Jones' homepage at the McDonald Institute has a photo of a relict canal from the Nasca, which looks pretty grim
• Deforestation killed Nascas - Cambridge study, The Australian
• Nazcas' destruction of forests caused downfall, Telegraph