Nazca done in by deforestation?

Most will probably know the Nazca as the creators of the Nazca Lines — the giant drawings in the desert.

Nazca monkey from Wikipedia

LA Times: “Peru’s Nazca culture was brought down with its trees”

Deforestation left nothing to hinder ancient floodwaters on the desert plain, researchers find. Modern Peru could learn from the civilization’s collapse, they say.

The Nazca people of Peru — famous for their huge line drawings on an arid plateau that are fully visible only from the air — set the stage for their demise by deforesting the plain, allowing a huge El Niño-fueled flood to ravage the Ica Valley about AD 500, researchers have found.

“They died out because they destroyed their natural ecosystem,” said archaeologist Alex J. Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute of Andean Studies in Lima, coauthor of a paper in the current issue of Latin American Antiquity. “As the population expanded, they put in too many fields and didn’t protect the landscape. The El Niño wiped away society.”