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Peru's Nazca Culture Was Brought Down with its Trees

from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)

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."

Chepstow-Lusty, David Beresford-Jones of the University of Cambridge and their colleagues used pollen in the soil to trace the horticultural history of the valley, revealing environmental depredation.