Ecological Lessons from the Nazca Collapse

McDonald Fellow, Dr David Beresford-Jones and his colleagues have found that the precipitous collapse of the Nazca people around AD 500 was presaged by logging trees to make way for farmland. The findings appear in Latin American Antiquity (Beresford-Jones, D.G. et al. Latin American Antiquity 20, 303-332 (2009)). David was interviewed for Channel 4 and the story is featured in Nature News.