The Story of El Nino and the Moche

by Brian Fagan

Rowing up and downe with small reedes on either side, they goe a league or two into the sea, carrying with them the cordes and nettes.... They cast out their nettes, and do there remaine fishing the greatest parte of the day and night, untill they have filled up their measure with which they returne well satisfied.

Jose de Acosta - Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias, 1588

Sometime in the mid-sixth century A.D., a strong El Nino brought torrential rains and catastrophic flooding to the northern coast of Peru. Thick, black clouds massed offshore, then thickened as they moved over the densely populated coastal river valleys. Heavy raindrops pattered on the ground, cracked and hard from severe drought. A powerful smell of wet earth permeated the air as the shower intensified, then stopped abruptly. Ever thicker clouds massed overhead, mantling the surrounding hilltops. Then the rain started, carried by a roiling wind from the ocean. Curtains of water pounded the valley in solid sheets. The rain continued unabatedmist, steady downpours, intense cloudbursts that flowed down dry hillsides. Normally placid rivers fueled by mountain runoff burst their banks and inundated the densely cultivated floodplain. Dikes gave way, canals burst, hundreds of acres of irrigated land became a freshwater lake. Deep layers of silt cascaded over carefully tended field systems. The work of generations vanished in a few hours as the rains and floods carried everything before them. Muddy water overwhelmed dozens of small villages clustered on the alluvium. Houses collapsed, thatched roofs floated downstream. Hundreds drowned as the people fled for their lives and camped on higher ground.

Even when the rain stopped and the wind dropped, the destruction continued. White steam rose from a sea of drying mud where green, irrigated crops once grew. Teams of villagers labored frantically to save untouched fields threatened by rising waters. Hills and valleys were awash. Erosion gullies gashed desert hillsides as millions of tons of sand and river silt swept out to sea. Huge Pacific swells driven by onshore winds pounded the beaches, piling great sand dunes above high tide levels. The fine sand swirled and blew inland, burying farmland and blocking river valleys. The dunes were mountains of destruction on the move.

Thirty kilometers inland from the raging Pacific, two brightly painted adobe pyramids towered over the inundated Moche Valley. Here the rulers of the glittering Moche state looked down on their highly irrigated and normally well-organized domains. The haughty lords were high above the muddy water, but the rain left its mark on their adobe mountains. Water flowed into tiny cracks in the stucco, turning small imperfections into deep crevices, and crevices into wide rifts, as the clay crumbled. Deep erosion gullies soon cratered the once-smooth sides of the sacred edifice as El Nino mocked the divine powers of the Moche leaders.

The sixth-century El Nino and the droughts of the same century sowed the seeds of destruction for one of ancient America's most spectacular and powerful civilizations. The tragic story of the Moche is a telling indictment of inflexible, despotic leadership.

Continued...