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Published online 2 November 2009 |
Nature
| doi:10.1038/news.2009.1046
Corrected online: 2 November 2009
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Native American culture sowed seeds of its own collapse
Floods brought the Nazca to their knees — but they crippled themselves by over-farming first.
The mysterious Peruvian culture that preceded the Incas had a significant hand in its own catastrophic collapse, new research suggests.
The Nazca people are thought to be responsible for the enormous drawing or geoglyphs etched into the deserts of southern Peru, known as the Nazca lines.
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Professor Bray raises the very important point of scale in his comments here and I would like, if I could, to elaborate slightly on my reply to that point.
Our investigations have been made only in the lower Ica Valley. And, certainly when talking of a gradual process, such as deforestation, there will always be considerable variations across time and space, and indeed possibilities of regeneration -- albeit slow for a tree than lives for over a millennium.
For instance, the lower Ica Valley was where human settlement was actually concentrated from the Early Horizon to the Early Intermediate. By contrast, the middle Ica Valley was only settled substantially after the building of the Achirana canal in the Late Intermediate, and after the lower valley had been largely degraded. This leads naturally to the modern relevance of our research, for the middle Ica Valley has suffered its catastrophic deforestation more recently, and mainly during the 20th C.
As to the Nazca drainage, Grodzicki identifies roughly contemporary effects of a major El Nino flood, including river down-cutting and a narrowing of the vegetated floodplain, at Cahuachi, the major Early Nasca ceremonial site.
In sum therefore, as I say, since the changes we record in the lower Ica Valley seem to correlate with the social changes recorded by archaeology more widely across the south coast, it seems reasonable, at the very least, to suggest that our lower Ica Valley case-study include some lessons for those wider changes. And indeed, we make that suggestion.
The key sentence is "Native Americans did not always live in harmony with their environment." The notion that they did is the last vestige of the "Noble Savage" myth, and should be widely condemned. There are other instances of environmental degredation due to pre-Columbian efforts, such as "oak openings" in Michigan, and the depletion of large fish in the Carbibbean. Their small populations and neolithic technology prevented them from doing even more damage.
This rings familiar.. conjures up our modern self-destructive agricultural habits- although we manage to up the ante by clinging to a modern version of medieval/feudal cattle idolatry to which we sacrifice not only our planet's climate control and biodiversity , but also our very own human healthiness & ultimate survival.
It just so happens that the fall of this South American civilization also coincides closely with what now appears to have been a significant comet encounter round about the 530's to 540's AD. Such encounters as the one alledged at this time and also elsewhere correlate with widespread, often world-wide climate shifts. (see bcclimate.com). Rod Chilton
Daniel Postellon should be careful about the way he uses 'myths'.
To some people, myths are the only true things.
Don't accuse pre-Inca societies in devastation of their own land or that they did not always live in harmony with their enviroment. It is widely known fact that the primeval societies – in contradiction to present so called "modern" societies – were living rather in full harmony with their enviroment.
Catastrophic collapse of the mentioned in the article mystarious cultures was caused not by their improper farming or behaviour but by abruptly appeared flood which washed down all together – the forests and living there people. The forests had been washed down together with the fertile soil what made impossible regeneration of any flora in the region after termination of the flood. This region deprived of the forests and fertile soil had become a desert afterwards and such remains until today.
Sudden flood was effect of abrupt displacement (slide) of the lithosphere over the mantle's matter. At time of shifting process oceanic waters, due to their inertia, would have been displacing themselves with some delay in relation to displacement of the land and, in cosequence, the waters of all oceans entered the lands nearby – on distances caunted in thousands of kilometers from the shoers and on tarrains situated thousands of meters over their level (in the South American's western shore in particular). The direct result of such phenomenon would have been tremendous destruction of fauna and flora in most the regions of the World. Such cataclysm appeared around 12,000 years ago.
It is worth to add that during the lithosphere's moving the Nazca region – situated nearly 2.000 km to the north in relation to the Equator before the cataclysm, had been displaced to actual position around 1,300 km to the south in relation to the Equator.
Such are conclusions of my study related to the nature of the deluges, which one can find in my book titled "Deluges" which was published in Polish language in 2005 and its English version was issued recently (in September 2009), and therefore is unknown internationally. Actually is available under adress j.nalecki@wp.pl only.
Jerzy W. Piskorz-Nalecki