Recent Holocene Climatic and Environmental Variability and Its Impact on Prehispanic Populations in the Sechura Desert

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Life on the Edge: Investigations in the Department of Piura, the “Extreme North” of the Central Andes, Peru" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Sechura Desert is currently characterised by a hyper-arid climate and regularly affected by extreme rainfall events linked to ENSO. During the most intense events, the desert is covered with denser vegetation and is occupied by temporary lakes. The current hydroclimatic variability raises the question of its impact on the coastal environment and the human groups that inhabited it in pre-Hispanic times. Despite the current scarcity of human occupation, numerous archaeological sites indicate a virtually continuous human presence since at least 7.000 years. The objective of our research is to examine how local populations adapted to short- and long-term fluctuations in coastal environments, focusing on the influence of regional and macro-regional geomorphological, hydro-oceanographic and climatic factors. In order to reconstruct the past socio-environmental dynamics, our approach cross-reference information from archaeological excavations (intra-site) and from morpho-sedimentary archives (off-site). The results reveal that coastal environments were significantly different from their contemporary counterparts, featuring lagoons formed as a result of the geomorphological context and more humid average climatic conditions. Human responses to these changes varied over time and space. Both long-term and short-term occupations are observed over the past two millennia, reflecting the adaptability of human populations to climatic and environmental shifts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Life on the Edge: Investigations in the Department of Piura, the “Extreme North” of the Central Andes, Peru

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52548