wrote:
Weatherlawyer wrote:

So what caused the events reported? The programme was too busy
detailing a theory about a so called vanished culture to get into
anything seriously useful.

Brian Fagan discusses the Moche civilization in his 1999 book
_Floods, Famines and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of
Civilizations_, chapter 7. The book _El Nino in History_ by
Caviedes also touches on it, but IMO this isn't as good a book.
Around 540 AD and for a couple of decades after, tree rings
in a number of places across the world suggest extreme short
term climate anomalies according to the book _Exodus to
Arthur_ by Mile Baillie. The cause is unclear, but the author
advances some hypotheses. I don't recall him linking these
to enhanced/prolonged ENSO activity, but there might be
a connection. Anyway, it is all fascinating stuff, IMO.

I was more interested in the climate detail than the huge jumps in
conlusions about a vanished governmental system. There is a link to the
el nino data collection in the site above: Punctuated equilibrium:
Searching the Ancient Record for El Nino. In The Quarterly Review of
Archaeology vol 8, no.3, 1987 by Michael Moseley

On a recent thead here I was proposing that most major cyclical upsets
are caused by deforestation, a more likely alternative to global
warming in my not very humble opinion.

Another link on the BBC site shows a detail of the weather system for
the Andes from the Pacific
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/programm.../virtual.shtml

The Amazon basin resembles a fan like leaf whose edge is the Andes and
whose stalk is the Amazon. Whilst all the water drains from the Andes
in the west to the Atlantic in the east, the wind system is blowing
rain clouds the other way.

A lot more on he http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/amazon/

I'm not that interested in fraught conclusions about things that can't
be changed. Especially not politics. It would seem that the culture
never changed that much and there is no history of human sacrifice in
what appears to be a friendly region o/a, despite outward apearances.

The programme alluded to human sacrifice but the evidence is more
suggestive of people starving doing things they would pay for later.
However if the riddle about what caused the problems is to be resolved,
I suppose a deal of anthropology is required.

Suppose the various tribes got to America once the Babylonian Empire
was replaced. Would it be possible that they were the slaves once
specialists in canal and pyramid building, looking for an home?

Which would put the colonising of the continent (or at least a boost to
it) some 1000 years prior to the demise of the Moche. Just enough time
to turn the plains of the Amazon into a jungle. So why settle in a
desert?

All pointless speculation. But it does seem that the majority of the
artisans that settled in South America settled on the west coast.