El Niño (Other Keyword)
1-6 (6 Records)
In this paper I will discuss the different lines of evidence pertaining to detecting El Niño and La Niña events at the site of Licapa II and surrounding Northern Chicama Valley. Flood deposits, dune encroachments episodes, malacological data, canal destruction and rebuilding events, and radiocarbon evidence are used as proxies to help understand the intensity and timing of ENSO events. I compare evidence from Licapa II to other sites inside and outside the Chicama Valley to highlight the...
Cultural Responses to Climate Changes in Preceramic Coastal Peru (2017)
Research at the archaeological site of Yara in southern coastal Peru has revealed at least three separate levels of human occupation in sequence with several large debris flow deposits. In this extremely arid environment these debris flows represent strong El Niño events that were potentially catastrophic to the inhabitants of the region. Evidence for the repeated occupation of the landscape in the face of these episodic hardships provides a window into human responses to the changing...
Floods, Famines, and Fagan: Recent Research on El Niño in the Age of Andean States and Empires (2015)
In 1997-98, the first mega-Niño of the internet age devastated vast regions of the equatorial Pacific basin and altered weather throughout the globe; El Niño became a household term. Within two years, Brian Fagan had published "Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations", calling global attention to potential impacts of the phenomenon in prehistory. The Peruvian coast is ground-zero for El Niño, and Fagan included a chapter on Peru in his book. Over the last 15 years,...
New Kid on the Block: El Niño-Modoki in Peru—Past, Present, and Future (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the climatological phenomenon referred to as El Nino Modoki, warm sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the central Pacific are flanked on the east and west by cooler SSTs. Over the last century, El Niño-Modoki has increased in frequency, but a long-term sequence has yet to be established prior to the last four centuries. At least on the north coast of...
Reevaluating the end of the Early Intermediate Period on the Peruvian coast from the perspective of the Lima culture (2017)
El fin del Periodo Intermedio Temprano en la arqueología peruana ha sido cronológicamente ubicado alrededor del 600 AD y culturalmente es representado por el final de culturas costeñas como Moche, Lima y Nasca. Alrededor del 600 AD hay evidencia de un evento extraordinariamente fuerte de El Niño, el cual ha sido registrado en sitios arqueológicos desde Piura hasta Lima. Este evento (o eventos), fue anteriormente interpretado como una importante causal de la caída de estas culturas costeñas, sin...
The Reitz Stuff: A Faunal Perspective on El Niño from Coastal Peru (2016)
For the last thirty years, zooarchaeological data from coastal Peru have provided groundbreaking insight into the Holocene history of El Niño, the interannual climatic phenomenon that affects global climate and human societies. Elizabeth J. Reitz has authored important studies with both of us on El Niño and faunal biogeography, and she served as a mentor to one of us in developing biochemical proxies for El Niño. In this paper, we review the history of faunal studies of El Niño and analyze...