Overview

The cultures thriving during the course of the millennia on the arid Peruvian South Coast between the valleys of Chincha and Yauca had a crucial impact on the history of the Central Andes in general. Important local cultures such as Paracas (ca. 800 - 250 BCE) and Nasca (ca. 250 BCE - 650 CE) are well known for rock carvings and ground drawings, but also for the extraordinary skills of their craftsmen in producing high-quality textiles and ceramics. The region also played a vital role in the formation and expansion of the pan-Andean empires of the Wari (ca. 650 - 1000 CE) and the Inca (ca.1470 - 1532 CE). Despite the South Coast's importance, relatively little is known about its settlement history. Thanks to a long-term archaeological project of the German Archaeological Institute, detailed data are now available for the northern part of the Rio Grande de Nasca drainage, a region well suited for a case study due to the abundance of comparatively well preserved archaeological remains. Based on these data 3,000 years of settlement history are being reconstructed in this volume. The settlement patterns of ten successive cultural phases show substantial changes in terms of settlement hierarchies and population development. Furthermore, the foci of settlement shifted. Due to the arid conditions in this region already minor fluctuations in absolute amounts and intra-annual distribution of precipitation have a significant impact on the agricultural potential. The question is therefore pursued whether past climate fluctuations may have been the principal trigger for changes in settlement behavior. For this purpose, analyses of archaeological data are compared to studies on climate history which suggest significant changes in precipitation patterns. Temporal correlations between important developments in settlement and climate could indicate a causal relation between both phenomena. While the limited and uneven resolution of the data impedes a definite assessment, the general trend seems to suggest that this was actually the case during some specific periods. The majority of major settlement shifts and demographic instabilities, however, do not temporally correlate with clearly traceable changes in climate.

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Review - German Es zeigt sich, dass die Archaologie heute nur in Kooperation mit den verschiedensten Wissenschaften eine umfassende Erklarung gesellschaftlicher Prozesse wahrnehmen kann. Gerade die Moglichkeiten neuer Technologien erweitern das Spektrum der Achaologen. In Sossnas Arbeit wird deutlich gezeigt, wie eng die Ausgraber mit Biologen, Zoologen, Klimaforschern, Chemikern und anderen Wissenschaftlern zusammenarbeiten. Das Ergebnis [...] ermoglicht sehr konkrete Thesen uber die damaligen Kulturen im Palpa-Tal Perus. Von: MKIn: AmerIndian Research, Bd. 12/2 (2017), Nr. 44, S. 124-125.---------------------------------- This book is the product of much intelligence bent with great energy towards an extremely knotty problem. It is elegantly written and beautifully set out and illustrated. Its review and distillation of secondary sources is, mostly, excellent. Yet what really sets Sossna's contribution apart is its foundation on findings from one of the most comprehensive archaeological projects to be conducted in Peru in our times: the Nasca-Palma Archaeological Project directed by Marcus Reindel of the German Archaeological Institute. This project epitomises the virtues of a German 'total archaeology': well-funded, multidisciplinary research over two decades, entailling real collaborations with the most appropriate Peruvian colleagues. The latest of many publications to emerge from this project, this book (and accompanying CD) disseminates the results of its achaeological survey, encompassing the northern Rio Grande drainage from its headwaters in the high Andes, down across the floodplains of a hyper-arid coastal plain, where it joins the southern tributaries of the drainage. [...][T]his book deserves to become essential reading, certainly for archaeologists of the south coast of Peru, due to its setting out of the exemplary survey data of the Nasca-Palma Archaeological Project, but also for those working far beyond, including archaeologists concerned with the difficult but important task of unravelling interactions between climate and society in the past, not least for what that may tell us about the present, or indeed the future. Von: David Beresford-Jones (MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Univeristy of Cambridge, UK)In: Downloaded from https: /www.cambridge.org/core. Durham University Library, on 04 Apr 2017, S. 548-550.

Es zeigt sich, dass die Archaologie heute nur in Kooperation mit den verschiedensten Wissenschaften eine umfassende Erklarung gesellschaftlicher Prozesse wahrnehmen kann. Gerade die Moglichkeiten neuer Technologien erweitern das Spektrum der Achaologen. In Sossnas Arbeit wird deutlich gezeigt, wie eng die Ausgraber mit Biologen, Zoologen, Klimaforschern, Chemikern und anderen Wissenschaftlern zusammenarbeiten. Das Ergebnis [...] ermoglicht sehr konkrete Thesen uber die damaligen Kulturen im Palpa-Tal Perus. MK, AmerIndian Research, Bd. 12/2 (2017), Nr. 44, S. 124-125. This book is the product of much intelligence bent with great energy towards an extremely knotty problem. It is elegantly written and beautifully set out and illustrated. Its review and distillation of secondary sources is, mostly, excellent. Yet what really sets Sossna's contribution apart is its foundation on findings from one of the most comprehensive archaeological projects to be conducted in Peru in our times: the Nasca-Palma Archaeological Project directed by Marcus Reindel of the German Archaeological Institute. This project epitomises the virtues of a German 'total archaeology': well-funded, multidisciplinary research over two decades, entailling real collaborations with the most appropriate Peruvian colleagues. The latest of many publications to emerge from this project, this book (and accompanying CD) disseminates the results of its achaeological survey, encompassing the northern Rio Grande drainage from its headwaters in the high Andes, down across the floodplains of a hyper-arid coastal plain, where it joins the southern tributaries of the drainage. [...][T]his book deserves to become essential reading, certainly for archaeologists of the south coast of Peru, due to its setting out of the exemplary survey data of the Nasca-Palma Archaeological Project, but also for those working far beyond, including archaeologists concerned with the difficult but important task of unravelling interactions between climate and society in the past, not least for what that may tell us about the present, or indeed the future. David Beresford-Jones (MacDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Univeristy of Cambridge, UK), Downloaded from https: /www.cambridge.org/core. Durham University Library, on 04 Apr 2017, S. 548-550

Author Information

Volker Sossna, born in 1980, studied Latin American Archaeology and Anthropology at the Free University (FU) of Berlin. From 2006 to 2014 he was closely involved in the works of the archaeological branches of the interdisciplinary Projects Nasca-Palpa and Andean Transect which were coordinated by the Commission for Archaeology of Non-European Cultures (KAAK, Bonn) of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI, Berlin). After finishing his master thesis about settlements of the Nasca culture in the Palpa region he started working on his PhD project on climate influences on long-term settlement developments in the entire northern part of the Rio Grande de Nasca drainage. Besides Andean archaeology, his current research interests include the adaption of digital tools in anthropology, namely databases and geographic information systems.

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