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A Late Holocene record of El Niņo/arid events and cultural changes from the Cuzco region, Peru
by
Alex Chepstow-Lusty
Department of Biological Sciences, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 West University Boulevard, Melbourne, Florida 32901, USA.
Coauthors: Michael Frogley (School of Chemistry, Physics and Environmental Science, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9QJ, United Kingdom)
The Cuzco region of Peru is part of a landscape that has witnessed significant anthropogenic modification since at least the beginning of the Holocene. This human manipulation of the environment appears to have been largely a response to changing climatic conditions, whereby c. 5000 years ago the 'early Holocene climatic optimum' (a time characterised by aridity in the Central Andes) gave way to a wetter period, that was punctuated by a series of droughts; some of these may be linked to extreme El Niņo episodes. This major climatic shift may not only have driven the establishment of agriculture in the region at that time, but also provided the impetus for many of the subsequent cultural changes.
Lake sediment cores provide an opportunity to understand how environmental and cultural events are linked by integrating continuous, well dated palaeoecological sequences with the archaeological record. The Cuzco region is extremely rich in archaeological remains. Marcacocha (cored in 1993), located to the north-west of Cuzco, has provided a highly detailed record of human impact and climatic change spanning more than 4000 years and is surrounded by significant Inca and pre-Inca remains.
Using the abundance of sedge pollen as a sensitive proxy for lake-level, in association with other environmental and anthropogenic indicators, a series of marked drier episodes are clearly represented in the record at c. 900 BC, 500 BC, AD 100, AD 550, and over a broader period from AD 900-1800. These periods not only correspond closely with major droughts/extreme El Niņo episodes, but also with important cultural changes that occurred in the Cuzco region and elsewhere in the Central Andes.
Date received: July 18, 2002
Copyright © 2002 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # caji-41.