This book presents an archaeological case of prehistoric human environmental impact: a study of ecological and cultural change from the arid south coast of Peru, beginning around 750 BC and culminating in a collapse during the Middle Horizon, around AD 900. Its focus is the lower Ica Valley - today depopulated and bereft of cultivation and yet with archaeological remains attesting to substantial prehistoric occupations - thereby presenting a prima facie case for changed environmental conditions.
Previous archaeological interpretations of cultural changes in the region rely heavily on...

The Andes are of unquestioned significance to the human story: a cradle of agriculture and of 'pristine' civilisation with a pedigree of millennia. The Incas were but the culmination of a succession of civilisations that rose and fell to leave one of the richest archaeological records on Earth. By no coincidence, the Andes are home also to our greatest surviving link to the speech of the New World before European conquest: the Quechua language family. For linguists, the native tongues of the Andes make for another rich seam of data on origins, expansions and reversals throughout prehistory....