Profile of Michael E. Moseley

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rchaeologist Michael E. Moseley not only studies ancient natural disasters, but he also cheerfully lives through modern ones, too. In 1970, while working on an excavation site in northern Peru, a 7.8-Richter magnitude earthquake hit, with the epicenter just miles away. After the aftershocks subsided, Moseley shoveled out his collapsed excavation, resumed work, and lived without electricity for 8 months. Two years later, he experienced devastating Peruvian El Nin ˜o floods, which he saw again in 1982 and in 1997. His most recent brush with nature was an 8.4-magnitude earthquake on the southern coast of Peru in 2001. Fortunately, unlike the 1970 disaster, this latest quake was not centered near many highly populated areas. As soon as the tremors faded, Moseley reunited with his graduate students and colleagues at a friend’s house, where, safely above any ensuing tsunami, they enjoyed a few celebratory beers. But not everyone has been as lucky, he points out. In the 1990s, more people were driven from their homes by natural disasters than by war, with approximately 20 million ‘‘ecological refugees’’ in existence today. Past societies were perhaps equally vulnerable. Moseley studies the archaeological record of these civilizations, the ones roughed up by a combination of natural disasters, especially droughts, floods, and earthquakes. His work in this niche of geoarchaeology holds implications for today’s world, too. ‘‘This is really the dark side of disaster. It’s scary for modern folks to think about,’’ Moseley says. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, Moseley is now a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL). His Inaugural Article (1), published in a previous issue of PNAS, describes his continuing work in traditional archaeology with Cerro Bau ´l. The Cerro Bau ´l colony, atop a 600-m mesa in southern Peru, was established by the Wari empire and likely served as an embassy-like enclave for governing nobles. The settlement housed a palace, temples, and elaborate brewing facilities. As the empire declined, the Bau ´l colony appeared to have been deliberately set afire and destroyed by the Wari during planned evacuation ceremonies. Becoming a Shovel Bum Moseley’s mother liked to joke that her son never left the sandbox. He was 10 years old when he first discovered fossils in a small local museum in Wiesbaden, www.pnas.org兾cgi兾doi兾10.1073兾pnas.0600844103

Michael E. Moseley

Germany, where his father was stationed as a United States Air Force medical officer after World War II. In his subsequent year in Washington, DC, Moseley saw his first museum arrowheads. ‘‘I thought, ‘Neat. You can just find stuff in the ground.’ The bug had bit me, and there was no looking back,’’ he says. When his father transferred to southern California, Moseley began volunteering at the San Bernardino County Museum (Redlands, CA). Only 13 years old, Moseley tagged along with the adult amateur archaeologists on digs in the southern California desert. ‘‘They’d tolerate a young kid. It wasn’t terribly structured, but it was a great opportunity,’’ he says, ‘‘and then I decided that I needed to get some better professional training.’’ The following summer, Moseley’s mother drove him to the central southern edge of Colorado to an archaeological field school that accepted young students. For 2 months, Moseley helped excavate a 700-year-old Plains Pueblo Indian site with Trinidad State Junior College (Trinidad, CO). With field training under his belt and a new driver’s license in hand, Moseley worked the next summer with the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. After helping to excavate 1,000-year-old pit houses, which were buried by the eruption of Sunset Crater, Moseley in 1960 joined the grueling Glen Canyon salvage project in Arizona. Glen Canyon was his favorite project yet, Moseley says. ‘‘They would take us up to a place called Mexican Hat high up the Colorado River and drop off two float-boats, provisions, and our fourman crew. We would drift downriver, shoot various rapids, and work on sites

for about 3 weeks without seeing another soul,’’ Moseley recalls. The heat was exhausting. ‘‘It was above 115 degrees in the sun, and ground temperatures measured 180 degrees. Even the Navajos abandoned the area during the summer,’’ he explains. Downstream, a support team would pick up the crew, take them to Flagstaff for a week of recuperation, and haul them back upstream to do it all again—and so on for Moseley’s entire summer vacation. Over the next 2 years, Moseley worked with the Museum of New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM) on the Navajo Reservoir salvage project, higher up on the Colorado River headwaters. After spending his teenage summers sweating in the field, Moseley was by then a skilled excavator, or ‘‘shovel bum’’ in the archaeologist’s slang. ‘‘There was a lot going on then in terms of archaeology. It was great to have the experience,’’ he says. School in the North, Research in the South In college, Moseley majored in geology for 2 years at the nearby University of Redlands (Redlands, CA) before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated in 1963 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and a minor in geology. Moseley applied to archaeology doctoral programs at the University of Chicago and Harvard University (Cambridge, MA), but his professor at Berkeley, J. Desmond Clark, had strong opinions about his student’s future. Behind the scenes, it was quietly arranged to have Moseley steered to Harvard, which he eventually attended. Still, after graduating from Berkeley, Moseley worked on his first international excavation, an early-man site in Spain run by the University of Chicago. Old World research has a certain allure for most archaeologists, but Moseley was more attracted to the relatively unexplored South America. He spent his first summer in Colombia working with a British excavation team. He returned to Massachusetts and prepared to do his doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine, a millennium-old civilization of people who left impressive stone carvings in the rugged mountains of south central Colombia. Before he could return to St. Augustine, however, he received a This is a Profile of a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences to accompany the member’s Inaugural Article on page 17264 in issue 48 of volume 102. © 2006 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA

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PROFILE

Profile of Michael E. Moseley

telephone call from a colleague in Colombia, warning him that bandits had overrun the area, shot a bus full of people, robbed a bank, and attacked the town’s police station. ‘‘My Colombian contact said, ‘Not this year,’’’ Moseley says. Moseley abandoned his original dissertation plans and turned instead to the arid Andean coast of Peru, about which he had recently written a graduate seminar paper. He had proposed that complex societies in the region had based their origins and support not in agriculture, which is the usual pattern, but in fishing and other marine activities. Moseley traveled to Lima, Peru, in 1966 and, aided by the remarkable preservation afforded by the dry climate, fleshed out his dissertation on this topic with a year in the field (2). Exploring and Abandoning Chan Chan In 1968, Moseley received his doctorate in anthropology from Harvard and remained there as an instructor. Interested in exploring new themes, he passed up excavation opportunities to spend his first summer writing a research proposal. He wanted to study the ancient city of Chan Chan, located in Peru and the former capital of the Incas’ biggest adversaries, the Chimor. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society, Moseley documented how Chan Chan had interacted with its outlying settlements. He alternated his semesters over the next several years teaching at Harvard and performing research in the field. Promoted to lecturer and then assistant professor, he conducted his own research and helped to supervise doctoral dissertations on human occupation of Chan Chan, its predecessor, the Pyramids of Moche, and other ancient monuments (3). Before long, however, the successful Chan Chan project garnered recognition from unwanted quarters. In 1975, Moseley learned that the project had been named a runner-up for the ‘‘Golden Fleece Award,’’ which included a list of programs that the late United States Senator William Proxmire considered to embody excessive government spending. Proxmire claimed Moseley and his colleagues were studying ‘‘the world’s biggest mud city,’’ and that their federally funded research had little or no relevance to most Americans. ‘‘That really provoked a reaction on my part,’’ Moseley explains, ‘‘I didn’t want my funding source threatened. I therefore began investigating why 30% to 80% more land was farmed in the past than was in production today.’’

Moseley examining a seismic fracture from a 2001 8.3-magnitude earthquake in Peru.

Causes of a Fractured Landscape Moseley started his new research into long-term agricultural change in areas around Chan Chan, where larger-thanmodern irrigation systems had been built and then later abandoned. At the time, traditional explanations for abandoned infrastructure usually faulted a society’s poor engineering or political decisions. Yet Moseley’s team found signs that a huge El Nin ˜o flood, not human error, had destroyed the crucial canals. Destructive inundation of other sites helped Moseley conclude that this deluge was the legendary Naymlap flood, which had induced the region’s desperate inhabitants to cast their ruler into the sea (4). After the flood, the people of Chan Chan repaired the irrigation canals and upgraded them with new stone lining. Nonetheless, the canals ended up desiccated and unusable. Moseley and his team realized that a typical El Nin ˜o flood was not sufficient to explain the fate of the irrigation system, which included some puzzling clues. ‘‘We found sections of the ancient canals that now sloped uphill,’’ Moseley says. Some researchers argued that this finding provided evidence of poor engineering by the Chan Chan builders. Moseley instead thought that earth movement in the seismically active region was more

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plausible. He suggested tectonic uplift as a cause, though now the forces of powerful earthquakes of magnitude 7 or greater seem more likely (5). In 1973, Moseley moved his home institution from Harvard’s Peabody Museum to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. In 1982, he shifted his field focus from northern to southern Peru, where he was funded by a heritage management program by the Southern Peru Copper Corporation, and he settled at the University of Florida in 1984. In southern Peru, Moseley teamed with David Keefer, a geologist with the United States Geological Survey, to investigate the interrelated effects of tectonics and El Nin ˜o events on ancient societies. By comparing recent El Nin ˜o flood sediments, Moseley and Keefer could identify two kinds of disasters that at times have befallen societies in southern Peru. In one scenario, a ‘‘mega-Nin ˜o’’ rainfall caused rivers to overflow and deposit thick layers of fine sediment across the landscape. The area saw this type of destruction most recently approximately 700 years ago, when flood deposits filled houses and canals. A special combined disaster can also result after a strong earthquake. The tremors would loosen the upper layer of the landscape, and then the first El Nin ˜o Nuzzo

flood thereafter would pick up large chunks of rock in its gushing torrents and scrape them along the landscape. This event appeared to have happened in the early 17th century, when an earthquake with a magnitude of approximately 8.4 struck the area Moseley and Keefer now study. Several years after the earthquake, strong El Nin ˜o floods deposited coarse debris across the landscape (6). ‘‘Fortunately, these supercatastrophes are not frequent, and I hope not to be around when the next one comes down!’’ Moseley says. Fragile Civilizations Moseley still does ‘‘straight’’ archaeology and has written a widely used introduction to Peruvian prehistory (7). Yet his research more often falls into the niche of geoarchaeology. The work draws on his interest in geology, born from his summers in the deserts of the American West. It also takes advantage of advances in environmental science, including climate and rainfall data from ice cores of mountain glaciers and lakes. ‘‘I’m fascinated by the potential impacts of environmental dynamics and disasters on agriculture and societies. Cultures come and go. Civilizations rise and fall. Nature was not a passive player in the past. The history of this environmental forcing must be explored if we are going to forecast appropriate responses to global warming,’’ he says. Moseley has grown to believe that long dry spells have played a key role in the evolution and destruction of cultures (8). He proposes that a drought can be the societal equivalent of AIDS, in that both serve to depress a system’s natural responses. Under these strained circumstances, a sudden disaster such as an El Nin ˜o flood can act as an opportunistic infection and completely kill off a civilization. ‘‘A drought is stressful enough, but then if we drop something else on top, it can be quite a killer,’’ Moseley says. 1. Moseley, M. E., Nash, D. J., Williams, P. R., DeFrance, S. D., Miranda, A. & Ruales, M. (2005) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 102, 17264–17271. 2. Moseley, M. E. (1975) The Maritime Foundations of Andean Civilization (Cummings Publishing, Menlo Park, CA). 3. Moseley, M. E. & Day, K., eds. (1982) Chan Chan: Andean Desert City (School of American Research,

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This line of research invites predictive models, not just retrodictive models, Moseley says, because these natural disasters, such as droughts, El Nin ˜o, and earthquakes, continue today. After an earthquake of magnitude 8.2 to 8.4 hit coastal Peru in 2001, Moseley and Keefer studied the event and wrote a paper drawing parallels to their archaeological research and predicted effects of future floods (9). ‘‘The environment is loaded with sediment. We’re waiting for the next big El Nin ˜o. It should give us one of those very big, very rough flood deposits,’’ he says.

‘‘I’m fascinated by the potential impacts of environmental dynamics and disasters on agriculture and societies.’’ Politics and Parties at an Ancient Peruvian Brewery In his PNAS Inaugural Article (1), Moseley described recent findings from his traditional archaeological work. He and his colleagues at the Museo Contisuyo in Peru and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago have been studying the Wari foreign enclave on the Cerro Bau ´l mesa in southern Peru. The Cerro Bau ´l settlement was discovered in the 1970s, but its purpose has been unclear. After several years of excavation, Moseley and his colleagues believe that the Wari empire established an elaborate settlement on Cerro Bau ´l to serve an embassy-like delegation of nobles and their attendants as they negotiated with the Tiwanaku state to the south. The colony included a lavish residential University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM). 4. Moseley, M. E. & Cordy-Collins, A., eds. (1991) The Northern Dynasties: Kingship and Statecraft in Chimor (Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC) 5. Moseley, M. E. (1983) Am. Anthropol. 85, 733–799. 6. Keefer, D. K., Moseley, M. E. & de France, S. D. (2003) Palaeogeogr. Palaeoclimatol. Palaeoecol. 194, 41–77.

palace and a brewery capable of producing 1,800-liter batches of chicha, an alcoholic beverage similar to beer. Moseley and his colleagues concluded that around the year 1000 A.D., the Wari elite abandoned their colony with elaborate ceremonies that included brewing, drinking, feasting, vessel smashing, and building burning. They abandoned the buildings quickly, and the brewery was probably the last to be evacuated. ‘‘There were big parties, and it looks like the biggest one was when they closed down the beer hall. There was a significant role of feasting and drinking in politics,’’ he says. It appears that the evacuation ceremony culminated with the brewery being set ablaze, as the Wari paramount lords sacrificed their ornate drinking vessels by dashing them to the ground in the fire. In his explorations of Cerro Bau ´ l, Moseley often scrambled up and down 200-ft mesa ‘‘like a goat,’’ he says, but because of worsening vertigo, these days he is happier on the ground. Now he focuses his Cerro Bau ´ l research on the irrigation network that supported mesa settlement, with an emphasis on how tectonic activity and ecological patterns inf luenced the fate of the society. He still spends as much time in Peru as possible. Of course, the United States is hardly immune to natural disasters, as Moseley himself personally experienced. In 2004, he was forced to replace the roof on his house in Florida after it was damaged by Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne. The year 2005 was a record-breaking one for tropical disturbances, and experts predict another rough, wet hurricane season for 2006. But with any luck, Moseley will be in Peru instead, tracking the effects of a new El Nin ˜ o on a fractured landscape and piecing together clues to understand the fate of fragile civilizations. Regina Nuzzo, Science Writer 7. Moseley, M. E. (2001) The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru (Thames and Hudson, London), 2nd Ed. 8. Moseley, M. E. (2002) in Catastrophe & Culture, eds. Hoffman, S. & Oliver-Smith, A. (School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, NM). 9. Keefer, D. K. & Moseley, M. E. (2004) Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 101, 10878–10883.

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