Collaborative Proposal: Impacts of El Nino Flooding on Sociopolitical Organization in the Moche Valley, Peru

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With National Science Foundation support Drs. Brian Billman and Gary Huckleberry will conduct two seasons of geological fieldwork in the Moche Valley in coastal Northern Peru. A regional manifestation of the warm phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, El Nino (EN) affects climate over a broad part of the globe. In northern coastal Peru, strong EN events result in massive fish die-offs and catastrophic floods in an otherwise hyperarid desert. It has been proposed that strong EN events in the past stressed prehistoric agricultural and maritime societies in the region and was thus a catalyst for cultural change, including changes in social organization. The exact nature of this relationship is debated in part because a solid chronology of prehistoric EN events that could be correlated to prehistoric cultural events does not exist. In 1997 a geoarchaeological reconnaissance of the middle Moche Valley resulted in the discovery of a 100+ meter long streamcut at the mouth of Quebrada de los Chinos. The 4 meter high exposure contains at least 11 discrete flood deposits intercalated with organic soils and cultural materials. This provides an opportunity to date at least 11 strong prehistoric events and to correlate these to the cultural chronology for the Valley. Drs. Billman and Huckleberry will document and date the stratigraphy. This will include profiling, photography and laboratory analysis of the sediments to accurately identify and discriminate depositional and pedogenetic processes. Age control will be provided by temporally diagnostic ceramics and radiocarbon dated charcoal. The objective is to construct an approximately 2,500 year proxy record. On this basis it will be possible to test the synchronicity between EN events and cultural change and to analyze the latitudinal variability of prehistoric EN flooding in coastal Peru by comparing the Quebrada de los Chinos stratigraphy with other paleoflood and archaeological sites.This research will be relevant to both paleoclimatologists and archaeologists and increase our understanding of how cultural development is affected by severe environmental perturbation. It will shed new light in the processes which lead to the rise, and decline, of complex societies.