Peru's Nazca culture was brought down with its trees
Deforestation left nothing to hinder ancient floodwaters on the desert plain, researchers find. Modern Peru could learn from the civilization's collapse, they say.
The Nazca people of Peru -- famous for their huge line drawings on an arid plateau that are fully visible only from the air -- set the stage for their demise by deforesting the plain, allowing a huge El Niño-fueled flood to ravage the Ica Valley about AD 500, researchers have found.
"They died out because they destroyed their natural ecosystem," said archaeologist Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, coauthor of a paper in the current issue of Latin American Antiquity. "As the population expanded, they put in too many fields and didn't protect the landscape. The El Niño wiped away society."
Now it looks like Palmdale!
The region is now "completely empty of any vegetation whatsoever," Beresford-Jones said.
"It's a deflated landscape: The wind has blown away the topsoil, so that features such as canals that were once cut into the landscape are now standing up above it, preserved in hard calcite."
LA Times article
