{"id":35146,"date":"2026-11-09T10:26:26","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T15:26:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=35146"},"modified":"2026-11-09T09:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-09T14:16:10","slug":"despite-sacrificing-people-after-catastrophic-el-nino-flooding-ancient-societies-were-generally-peaceful","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/11\/despite-sacrificing-people-after-catastrophic-el-nino-flooding-ancient-societies-were-generally-peaceful\/","title":{"rendered":"Despite sacrificing people after catastrophic El Ni\u00f1o flooding, ancient societies were generally peaceful"},"content":{"rendered":"

To understand how societies might react to climate change, archaeologists look at social responses to extreme climate events<\/strong> in the past \u2014 and in some places, that included measures as drastic as human sacrifice. Mass ritual sacrifices along the desert coast of northern Peru have been linked to catastrophic flooding caused by El Ni\u00f1o, which made researchers wonder if such sacrifices were part of a rise in violence driven by resource scarcity. But a new survey of the Lambayeque Valley suggests that violence was extremely rare, even during periods of ecological upheaval.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main thing that jumped out at us was just how few cases of interpersonal violence<\/strong> we observed outside ritualized contexts,\u201d said Dr Thomas Snyder of New York University, co-author of the article in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology<\/em>. \u201cThis really highlights that widespread violence isn\u2019t a predetermined response to climate change. As a society, we both get to and have to choose how we respond to our own climate crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Lambayeque there\u2019s 6,000 years of creative adaptations to El Ni\u00f1o and longer-term changes in climate, and widespread violence wasn\u2019t one of them,\u201d said Dr Haagen Klaus of George Mason University, co-author. \u201cViolence and social unraveling are not destined outcomes, ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

A vulnerable valley\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The researchers examined the Lambayeque Valley Biohistory Project\u2019s skeletal record, covering 30 sites and more than 3,000 years of the valley\u2019s history<\/strong>. 1,633 individuals had relatively clear dates of death, allowing the scientists to put their lives in context with paleoclimatic modelling. The researchers tracked the incidence of cranial trauma (usually caused by violence) and postcranial trauma (usually accidental) over time, and compared it to contemporary changes in precipitation and water availability.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Lambayeque Valley was home to a sequence of creative, innovative, and resilient cultures,\u201d said Klaus. \u201cThe people of ancient Lambayeque were probably very different from us. On the other hand, archaeological evidence shows that in so many ways they were mirrors of us \u2014 in how they lived their daily lives, interacted with their world, ran their economies, and confronted (and sometimes contributed to) environmental crises.\u201d<\/p>\n

The valley normally had very little rainfall, but it benefited from rivers and seas bursting with life. El Ni\u00f1o events<\/strong> killed off fish stocks and flooded the valley with torrential rain, throwing local food production systems into crisis.<\/p>\n

\u201cLeaders of the Moche and Sic\u00e1n appear to have held power partly by their claims to be intercessors with the natural world,\u201d explained Klaus. \u201cLarge-scale events of human sacrifice just before the collapse of the Moche and Sic\u00e1n political systems appear like attempts at bringing the forces of nature back into balance by offering their most precious lives to the supernatural. It\u2019s here where the most extensive evidence of violence is found in Lambayeque.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf these big ritual sacrifices were indicative of some underlying crisis, we hypothesized that these events might have been extending into people\u2019s everyday experience of the world,\u201d added Snyder.<\/p>\n

No case to answer\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

But surprisingly, only 25 individuals (1.6% of the sample) showed evidence of violence and only 77 (5.1% of the sample) showed evidence of accidental trauma. There was no link between either violence or accidents and ecological instability. There was also no link between a person\u2019s sex and violence.<\/p>\n

This is very different to other sites in the Andes, where cranial trauma is much more common, especially during periods of climatic upheaval. It\u2019s possible that Lambayeque Valley\u2019s access to the sea helped alleviate resource scarcity, or that differing ways of organizing society intentionally reduced violence.<\/p>\n

However, Snyder and Klaus point out that their results are estimates. They used proxies for accidents and violence, which could conceal some violence: not all wounds affect the skeleton. Additionally, they emphasize that their findings reflect long-term trends and might not capture short-term incidents.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the challenges ended up being temporal resolution,\u201d explained Snyder. \u201cWith an archaeological sample size this large, it just wouldn\u2019t be feasible to radiocarbon date every individual. So we\u2019re really looking at long-term associations \u2014 or their absence. In an ideal world I would like to radiocarbon date the entire sample, to see if any trends appear that we might have missed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people think that archaeological research is interesting, but we really want to emphasize that it is also useful,\u201d concluded Snyder. \u201cAs the saying goes, \u2018there is nothing new under the sun\u2019. By looking to the past, we can answer questions about how people have dealt with similar crises to those we\u2019re facing now and apply that knowledge to the present.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\n

JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To understand how societies might react to climate change, archaeologists look at social responses to extreme climate events in the past \u2014 and in some places, that included measures as drastic as human sacrifice. Mass ritual sacrifices along the desert coast of northern Peru have been linked to catastrophic flooding caused by El Ni\u00f1o, which… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":35147,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1012,857,991,798,338,1166,1448],"tags":[586,161,909,62],"class_list":["post-35146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archaeology","category-climate","category-culture","category-ecology","category-stress-2","category-time","category-violence","tag-climate","tag-interpersonal","tag-population","tag-stress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35148,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35146\/revisions\/35148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}