El Niño, Catastrophism, and Culture Change in Ancient America (review)

Based on the 2002 Dumbarton Oaks symposium of the same name, El Niño, Catastrophism, and Culture Change in Ancient America focuses on ways that catastrophic natural events influenced pre-Columbian histories and cultures. The book has an introduction and three parts: "Ancient American Climates," "The Andes," and "Central America and Mesoamerica." It is distinctly interdisciplinary, involving climate scientists, geoscientists, archeologists, cultural anthropologists, and epidemiologists who address the subject matter from the perspectives of the physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities—sometimes integrating all three perspectives in the same study. Like many edited volumes, there is great diversity among the chapters, but for the most part this variety makes for enjoyable reading.

After the editors' introduction, the book stumbles when trying to set the climatological context for the archeological interpretations to follow. The chapter on paleoclimatic reconstruction from ice cores familiarizes the reader with ice-core basics but fails to connect with the material in the rest of the book. There is little reason to read this somewhat technical treatise. The next chapter on the El Niño phenomenon and its influence on interannual climate variation does relate geographically and topically to many of the book's studies. Nonetheless, this dry chapter only covers the last few decades, neglects the large body of work on El Niño before instrumental records (which would be particularly useful in this volume), and again fails to provide climatological information that readers need to know to understand the climatic catastrophes and human disruptions covered in the rest of the book. Once more, there is little reason to read this chapter.

Despite the unfortunate hiccup in the first section, the remainder of the book is a captivating exploration of human-environment interactions. The second section on coastal and Andean Peru and Ecuador opens with an investigation by Quilter and Sandweiss into how changes in the frequency of El Niño events together with Holocene sea level rise created the basis for robust marine fisheries in coastal Peru. The coupling of these fisheries with adjacent inland agriculture led to the complex societies and monumental architecture to follow in succeeding centuries. In the next chapter, Roscoe develops a theoretical model linking catastrophe and political complexity. He uses this model to explain how highland political entrepreneurs took advantage of coastal El Niño disasters to gain power over both lowland and highland populations and their resources. Billman and Huckleberry next focus attention on the Moche River valley, locus of the Moche civilization that dominated the northern Peruvian coast for the millennium from 400 BC to 600 AD. Taking their cue from Roscoe –– but basing their work on physical evidence –– they paint a convincing picture of how rulers might have used an understanding of El Niño cycles to demonstrate their divine connection. Moseley and Keefer shift geographical attention to the coast of southern Peru and concentrate on flood deposits left by recent very strong El Niño events. Their work suggests that "megaNiños" strike the area periodically, wiping out sedimentary evidence of earlier El Niño events and archeological evidence of human habitation. The section concludes with an enthralling study of the dreadful disease Bartonellosis, spread by sand flies and resulting in terrible disfigurement and in mortality rates double those for smallpox and greater than those for plague. Kiracofe and Marr piece together a persuasive argument that Inca troop movements that coincided with an El Niño-spawned outbreak of sand flies led to a massive Bartonellosis epidemic, which decimated the troops, ravaged the population of Cuzco, and killed the Inca ruler Huayna Capac, thereby leading to the ultimate collapse of the empire.

The final section of the book consists of three chapters on catastrophism in Central America and Mesoamerica. In the first of these, Sheets addresses explosive volcanism in Central America...