Description:

Mary Weismantel, Professor of Anthropology, Northwestern.

In the twenty-first century, anthropogenic climate change brings new urgency to the question of how to live with dangerous and unpredictable weather events such as massive flooding; the long history of indigenous South America is one place to look for answers. This talk looks at the relationship between water and human life on the North Coast of Peru, a region with a long and impressive archaeological record that includes the earliest monumental architecture in the Americas. Initially, cultural development was supported by abundant maritime resources and fertile river valleys; over time, irrigation canals transformed vast expanses of desert into productive agricultural zones. Nevertheless, archaeologists often describe this environment as a difficult one, “fragile and risk-prone” due to natural disasters including earthquakes, sand invasions, and especially the region’s infamous mega-El Niños, which take lives, destroy built environments and devastate local ecologies. This paper asks how indigenous inhabitants of the North Coast responded to this oscillation between fertility and destruction; the focus is less on technological solutions or political outcomes than on the ontological relationship to the nonhuman world that made those solutions possible and meaningful. The evidence assembled to answer this question is diverse and the approach is exploratory, intended to provoke further debate rather than offer final conclusions.

This talk is presented by the Environmental Humanities Research Workshop of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.