Anthropology lecture: El Nino’s Role in Ancient Peru

The department of anthropology presents a lecture, “Climate, Catastrophe, Collapse?: Using Climatic and Cultural History to Understand El Nino’s Role in Ancient Peru," with Dan Sandweiss from the University of Maine.

Sandweiss will discuss the stresses and opportunities of El Niño for ancient societies on the Peruvian coast and the relationship between El Niño frequency and cultural change. The climatic perturbation known as El Niño offers a useful lens for viewing past human behavior in coastal Peru, because 1) extreme events often destroy or damage infrastructure, curtail subsistence production, and bring negative health consequences including death; and 2) the frequency of extreme events has varied through time. Some positive effects of El Niño offer opportunities for mitigation, but on the whole events are negative for most humans in their path.

Presented by the Center for Archaeological Sciences, the UGA Laboratory of Archaeology, the Center for Applied Isotope Studies, and the UGA Department of Anthropology.

Image: An undated image of a hummingbird, one of the ancient Nazca lines, in seen in the Piura Region of Peru. | Reuters