The Good Old Days Were Better: Agrarian Collapse and Tectonics Michael E.

Moseley American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 85, No. 4. (Dec., 1983), pp. 773-799.
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The Good Old Days Were Better: Agrarian Collapse and Tectonics
MICHAEL MOSELEY E. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois
The theory o f plate tectonics contends that the continental plates occupied by humanity are in motion. The hypothesis of agrarian collapse (HAC) holds that gradual, as well as seismic, earth movement can induce ground slope change and modify land-to-sea level relationships, thereby altering the distribution of surface and subsurface runoff, which can lead to abandonment of agricultural land. Mechanical principles underlying ongoing abandonment are detailed for large-scale irrigation systems of the Andean Cordillera h'egra. These principles are compatible with a historical scenario integrating urban development at pre-Hispaic Chan Chan, capital of the Chimor polity, with expansion, reform, and collapse of the city's agricultural hinterland. The applicability of the mechanics o f agrarian collapse to two other centers of past civilization is briefly considered. [agriculture, complex society, applied archeology, Peru]

INTRODUCTION
ONEOF THE MOST WIDESPREAD AND RECURRENT PHENOMENA documented by anthropology is the transformation of formerly farmed lands into areas that are no longer agriculturally productive. Ranging from ethnographic observations of deserted fields, through archeological explorations of civilizations that once thrived where today marginal subsistence at best supports scattered populations, the incidence of agricultural abandonment is global and has long defied simple explanation. However, the sheer magnitude of the abandonment problem may reflect a very simple, very subtle mechanical process. The hypothesis of agrarian collapse, or "HAC," holds that in all areas of the globe experiencing high rates of tectonic activity-such as the Andean and Mesoamerican Cordilleras and the Middle Eastern Fertile Crescent -large-scale losses of agricultural lands can potentially be analyzed as mechanical consequences of small, tectonically induced ground slope changes that automatically alter runoff, groundwater, and erosion conditions, and vegetational patterns in manners that are predictable from what is known about the rate, direction, and nature of local crustal movement. Simply put, gradual earth movement changes water flow patterns, and vegetation follows suit. If the process of Andean agrarian collapse, reviewed in this article, has been correctly analyzed, then parallel processes will, of geophysical necessity, be underway in other tectonically active settings.

MICHAEL E. MOSELEY 1 Curator of Middle and South American Archeology and Ethnology, Field Museum of Natural
s History. Chicago. IL 60657.
Copyright (c) 1983 by the American Anthropological Association 0002-7294/83/040773 27$3.20/1

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T h e Andean Setti;zg
The Andean case study is focused on drainage and agriculture in the Pacific watershed of the Cordillera Negra of northern Peru between 6 and 9' south latitude (Figures 1 and O 2). In this setting, ongoing landscape alteration is structured by extremes in physical conditions: 1. Relative to its great height, the Andean Pacific watershed is one of the shortest and steepest in the world (Kosok 1965; Zeil 1979). Therefore, water flow responds rapidly and actively to small changes in ground slope or to changes in land-to-sea level relationships. 2. The watershed is part of the leading edge of the westward-moving South American Plate, and 150 to 200 km west of the coastline it collides with the Nazca Oceanic Plate, which is propelled eastward by high rates of sea floor spreading and underthrusts the Andean range at an average subduction rate of approximately 10 cm per year (Minster et al. 1974; Toksoz 1975). The oceanic plate passes less than 100 km beneath the Cordillera Negra, which has exhibited rates of gradual vertical oscillation averaging up to 1.8 cm per year, as well as large earthquakes (Wyss 1978). Therefore, the watershed is tectonically very active and the crustal blocks on which the landscape rides are in motion. 3. The lower 40%-50% of the watershed lies within the world's driest desert (Lettau and Lettau 1978), and rainfall below approximately 2,000 m elevation occurs only in association with El NzEo perturbations (Nials et al. 1979; Wooster 1980). These perturbations of normal marine and meteorological conditions can be predicted a year and a half in advance by the newly developed Ocean-Atmosphere paradigm (Wyrtki 1975; Cromie 1980; Gill 1982). The paradigm is also retrodictive and provides controls for holding late Holocene rainfall and climatic variability along the watershed as relative constants (Richardson 1981). These three extremes in physical conditions entail mechanical processes and consequences that have wide-ranging environmental and economic ramifications. One ramification is that extreme topographic inequities in the natural distribution of land and water can only be overcome by large, long canal systems. In turn, abandoned canal systems provide a slope-sensitiverecord of water movement over great tracts of land and allow changes in the artificial distribution of water to be cross-correlated with changes in the natural hydrological regime.

T h e Hypotl~eszsof Agrarian Collapse

As a consequence of high rates of tectonic underthrust, which tilts the Pacific watershed upward and raises the land relative to the sea, steep-gradient rivers automatically downcut their channels to seek equilibrium with the ocean level, which has remained relatively constant in recent millennia. River entrenchment automatically lowers runoff and groundwater relative to the land surface, and the entire hydrological regime constricts, with consequent distributional contraction of surface vegetation. Canal intakes tie irrigation physically to this broader process of erosion and desertification. As rivers downcut, canal intakes gradually lose efficiency and eventually become stranded above the entrenching streams, leading to abandonment of formerly farmed fields. In evaluating this hypothesis, it is important to realize that it stresses the cumulative effects of gradual tectonic movement-not seismically violent events-and that most ground slope changes detected archeologically are quite small, generally not exceeding l o or 2' per millennium. Yet, regardless of whether slope change is positive or negative, the hypothesis holds that crustal movement of 1 cm or more per year prevents hydrological equilibrium of surface and subsurface water flow and, in turn, this prevents vegetational equilibrium - artificial or otherwise.

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Figure 1. Uncorrected mosaic of satellite images showing the Peruvian north coast from the Chancay to Santa rivers. Line a-a is the scarp line defining the coastal plain, while line b-b controls the valley necks, where bedrock chokes close to the river.

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Figure 2. Irrigated areas of the Peruvian north coast. The city of Chiclayo is located in the Chancay drainage and the city of Chimbote in the Santa. Note the north to south decrease in the area irrigated.

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Cultural Considerations
Loss of arable land is a widespread problem that people have often sought to explain in terms of cultural referents such as primitive cultivation technology, inept agrarian administration, or foreign conquest. It is necessary to briefly review cultural considerations of agricultural collapse in the Andes if HAC is to be understood as a viable alternative hypothesis.

T h e Problem
The Andean Cordillera is a towering monument to the disquieting fact that throughout much of Latin America significantly more land was farmed in the past than is presently cultivated. Spanish conquistadors commemorated this pervasive pattern of agrarian collapse by naming the New World's longest towering mountain chain, the Andes, after its most ubiquitous and impressive feature: andenes, or agricultural terrace systems (Miller 1829, 11: 219), the abandoned remnants of which blanket the rugged cordillera from Colombia to Chile. The magnitude of agrarian collapse in the Western Hemisphere was drawn into sharp focus with the advent of aerial and satellite photography, which graphically contrasted the scope of ancient and present-day farming. Andenes, which reclaimed mountainous areas, and the so-called "ridged fields," which reclaimed tropical lowlands (Denevan 1982), are alien to the traditions of western European agricultural technology and remain largely uninvestigated. However, canal-based irrigation systems are not alien to the 20th century but rather represent the hallmark of arid land reclamation projects being executed by the industrialized nations. Along the Andean desert coast it is possible to compare and contrast past and present irrigation systems and thereby gain understanding of the agricultural future. The largest irrigation networks ever constructed in South America are open channel delivery systems in the Pacific drainages lying between approximately 6" and 14" south latitude. These canal systems reclaimed areas of the coastal desert from the contemporary Peruvian city of Chiclayo in the north to the Port of Pisco, south of Lima. The systems are pre-Hispanic, no longer in use, and lie outside the confines of the smaller, contemporary irrigation systems. The largest reclamation projects in the region are multivalley link-ups that moved water from a river where it is plentiful to an arid basin or valley where it is scarcer. The largest multivalley link-ups ever constructed are nowabandoned pre-Hispanic canal systems connecting seven river basins from the Rio Motupe (6" south latitude), through the Rio Moche (8" south latitude) (Kosok 1940, 1965; Kus 1972; Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1982, 1983; Ortloff, Feldman, and Moseley 1982; Shimada 1981; Eling 1981). The largest reclamation projects currently under construction in the same region seek to reactivate or reestablish old intervalley canal systems and reclaim abandoned lands. These modern undertakings rely on Western engineering and large-scale construction techniques that are supported by international financing. The time required for agricultural yields to cancel investment costs is literally measured in decades, if not centuries. Significantly, none of these modern projects proceeds from prior study of why the comparable pre-Hispanic irrigation systems collapsed in the first place.

T h e Premzje
The present practice of obliviously constructing major reclamation works in the uninvestigated ruins of far larger past systems reflects the fact that neither Western science nor society perceives agrarian collapse to be either a problem or a geophysical

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process. This is because Western observers, from the conquistadors on, have systematically presumed that abandonment of past agricultural systems can be explained by various social causes ranging from inept indigenous agrarian practices, through foreign conquest, to demographic decline following the introduction of Old World diseases. Presumptions of social causality have been institutionalized because of presumptions about landscape immutability and a tacit but pervasive equation of environmental change with climatic change. The reason lies in traditional concepts about the energy needed to drive large-scale alteration of the physical environment in desert settings. The principal agent thought to drive change was variation in solar energy leading to climatic variation. Therefore, if significant climatic variation ended with the last glacial advance, then environmental change largely stopped at the end of the Pleistocene. Thus, agricultural abandonment on an immutable landscape could only be explained socially.

The Social Varza bles

Within the Cordillera Negra, social variables relevant to large-scale canal irrigation are most readily controlled, archeologically, in the Rio Moche drainage (8' south latitude), which was the focus of considerable research during the last decade (Moseley and Day 1982). More than 500 excavations were opened in abandoned agricultural structures. A series of carbon 14 dates indicates that (1) most well-preserved abandoned agricultural structures date after A.D. 500; (2) their maximum areal expanse was reached about A.D. 1000; and (3) three-quarters or more of subsequent agrarian contraction occurred before about A.D. 1350 (Moseley et al. 1982; Ortloff, Feldman, and Moseley 1982). Overall, the area under irrigation in the lower Moche drainage has decreased some 35% to 40% during the last millennium and a half. The pre-Incan and pre-Spanish contraction of Moche Valley agriculture is consistent with survey results in other drainages between 6' and 9' south latitude (Kosok 1940, 1965; Shimada 1981; Willey 1953; West 1979, 1981; Eling 1981). These data do not suggest that foreign conquest by the Inca or Spanish or ensuing demographic decline were primary causes of large-scale agrarian collapse. Although there is methodological debate as to the engineering analysis of the excavated Moche Valley canal sample (see Farrington 1983; Ortloff et al. 1983), there is consensus that sophisticated hydraulic designs were employed, including such structures as "hydraulic jumps" and other open channel flow features that Western canal engineering did not begin to define until about a century ago (Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1982). A high level of empirical technological knowledge is fully consistent with more than 20 centuries of prior experience with large-scale irrigation and with the physical magnitude of the abandoned systems. This is not to imply that pre-Hispanic hydraulic engineering is well-explored or completely understood; it is not. However, extant data do not suggest that the roots of agrarian collapse lie with native technology. Most arable land reclaimed and abandoned in the Moche drainage between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1350 was centrally administered-much like a large plantation-from the city of Chan Chan, the Chimu imperial capital located on the north side of the river (Keatinge and Day 1973). The Chimu polity has often been considered a "hydraulic society" (Collier 1955; Steward 1955) similar to certain Asian irrigation-based societies that Karl Wittfogel (1957) treated in the developmental model of "Oriental Despotism." bureaucratic stagnation and mismanageOne tenet of this model holds that increasir~g ment precipitates economic decline-if not physical breakdown-of the irrigation systems sustaining the state (Wittfogel 1955:49, 1957:442). Mismanagement is difficult to evaluate in an archeological context but requires consideration. Much of the monumental architecture at Chan Chan consists of repetitive, patterned

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structures identified as bureaucratic in nature, although exactly who was administering what is not clear in detail (Day 1982a, b). Because the ruins of the Chimu capital sprawl over more than 20 km2, they articulate stratigraphically with ancient canals and large tracts of abandoned fields. Therefore, the growth of the city and the development of administrative architecture can be physically cross-tied to the agricultural hinterland, allowing correlations of change in urban and rural settings and a general assessment of Chimu management policies (Kolata 1982; Moseley et al. 1982). Chimu canal construction and agricultural expansion employed corvee labor and were directed from adjacent state-built administrative complexes that were designed in conformity with the canons of bureaucratic architecture at Chan Chan (Keatinge 1974; Andrews 1974). Both the urban and rural administrative architecture became more formal and patterned through time, which is thought to reflect increasing formalization of bureaucratic roles and activities rather than significant numerical growth in administrators or the rise of a "top-heavy" bureaucracy. With the onset of agrarian collapse after about A.D. 1000, rural administrative complexes ceased to be built. However, construction of monumental architecture continued at the capital for centuries, even as the local irrigation system constricted. The distribution of urban administrative architecture changed in response to changing supplies of potable water within the city, but the scale of building activity did not alter appreciably. Indeed, there was a population influx relatively late in the history of the city (Klymyshyn 1982; Topic 1982). This situation is presumed to reflect the fact that the overall prosperity of the city was tied to aggressive political expansion that entailed a major conquest of the northern Lambayeque polities shortly before Inca subjugation of the Chimu empire (Kosok 1965). If administrative mismanagement led to the breakdown of Chimu irrigation systems, then it might be expected that comparable mismanagement would be reflected, at least to some extent, in urban planning and prosperity and the political fortunes of the state. The Chan Chan data do not support such correlations. Indeed, on the basis of extant information, it is easier to propose that agricultural collapse fostered political expansion than it is to propose that political mismanagement fostered irrigation contraction. In overview, the Moche archeological data do not suggest social causality as a prime mover in widespread abandonment of agricultural lands in the Cordillera Negra. This is not to say that demographic disruption, foreign invasions, engineering limitations, or bureaucratic decisions did not affect agricultural configurations. Rather, the cultural data suggest no a priori reasons not to examine change in the natural hydrological regime as a potential factor in agrarian collapse.
The Alternatzue Premise

HAC proceeds from a straightforward premise: social causality can never be proven until all potential sources of natural causality are first disproven. To proceed otherwise would be to confuse things that behave according to physical principles with things that behave according to social norms. The premise of HAC is that there are physical correlations between environmental degradation, agricultural failure, chronic canal intake problems, river entrenchment, tectonic ground slope alteration, and peoples' tales of "the good old days" when things were verdant. To assess the probabilities of such correlations for a given area, the ethnographer needs to consult seismic and volcanic atlases, or plate convergence models plotting the recent incidence and rate of earth movement. Any watershed experiencing seismic or volcanic activity or high rates of tectonic activity is unlikely to be in hydrological balance. The problems confronting archeologists are rather more demanding. Processes

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capable of triggering landscape changes that lead to agrarian collapse will also be capable of differentially influencing the preservation of abandoned agrarian structures. Such preservation patterning must be identified in the archeological record before the original functional characteristics of abandoned agricultural systems can be analyzed or the cause of failure identified. Applied to the abandoned Chicama-Moche Intervalley Canal, which was built to supply the city of Chan Chan, this procedure has stirred a debate that provides insight into presumptions about landscape immutability or change. Four decades ago, the first aerial stereophotographic coverage of the coast documented the presence of abandoned canal sections exhibiting slight uphill slopes (Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1983; Fig. 1). However, such occurrences only drew attention recently, when three of four independent surveys of the Chimu-built Intervalley Canal identified channel sections with low-level (up to 1.5') uphill slopes (Kus 1972; Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1982; Pozorski and Pozorski 1982; see Farrington and Park 1978). The four surveys are evenly divided, philosophically, between concepts of mutable and immutable landscapes by the issue of whether or not there has been significant physical alteration of the canal by natural processes, specifically tectonic movement. The position that both the canal and the more than 70 km of landscape it crosses are mutable and have undergone alteration (Kus 1972) has led to identification of bedrock structures and Holocene tectonic movements consistent with the distortion of the canal (Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1982). The position that the canal and landscape have remained immutable underlies the two opposing studies. One study, denying tectonic alteration, contends that the abandoned canal presently runs uniformly downhill and worked in the past. It concludes that other studies claiming uphill slopes are erroneous: ". . . I suspect that their [Ortloff et al.] errors may be the result of poor surveying" (Farrington 1983:373). The second study, dismissing tectonic alteration, recognizes uphill canal slopes and explains these as errors resulting from poor surveying during the original construction of the canal: ". . . the resultant optical illusion of having an uphill canal appear to be sloping downhill apparently stymied the Chimu time and again" (Pozorski and Pozorski 1982:858). This logic is defended with claims that there is no visible evidence of tectonic activity along the Intervalley Canal and is bolstered by citations of geological studies of California's San Andreas Fault system. Indeed, the San Andreas Fault, where crustal blocks slide horizontally past one another, is a popular public archetype of what tectonic activity looks like. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with what tectonic activity looks like where an oceanic plate underthrusts a continental margin. PHYSICAL CONSIDERATIONS To evaluate the agrarian consequences of plate tectonics, the nature, direction, and rates of crustal movement along the Cordillera Negra must be reviewed in order to assess the influences acting on the hydrological regime and on agriculture.

The Watershed
The watershed consists of crustal blocks of igneous and metamorphic rock fractured along fault lines and bedding planes. A pronounced high-flexure (steeply tilted) fault scarp forms the western face of the Cordillera Negra. It emerges from the sea at approximately 9' south latitude, and trends northward and inland to approximately 6' (Figure 1:a-a). This great uptilted structure divides the watershed into longitudinal coastal, canyon, and highland sections. The scarp is in turn cut by transverse faults, often expressed as en echelon faults (Plafker, Ericksen, and Concha 1971). Along the coast, these transverse faults result in bay formations of similar structure where the local southern

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coastal block has oscillated up and out relative to the northern block. In concordance with its adjacent drainages, the Rio Moche arises at a high elevation (3,988 m), descends at a steep average slope (2.2') over a very short course (105 krn) that follows a transverse fault system. The steep river gradient and the often very steep bedrock landscape through which the river course descends reflect ongoing tectonic uplift of the watershed.
Rates and Nature of Tectonic Actzinty

High rates of tectonic activity within the study area are a product of convergence between the westward-moving Continental Plate and the eastward moving Nazca Oceanic Plate. Based on geophysical data integrated in the plate-rotation model of Minster et al. (1974), the Nazca plate is predicted to be converging with South America on an azimuth of about 80' and at a rate that decreases northward from 11.1 cm per year off central Chile to 8.9 cm per year at the equator. Rates of about 9 cm per year have proved acceptable for the Ecuadorian subduction system immediately north of the study area (Lonsdale 1978:2456; Herd et al. 1981:441). Cores from deep-sea drilling off the coast in the vicinity of the study area are compatible with an approximate 10-cm-per-yearrate that has been relatively uniform for the last five million years (Kulm et al. 1976:795, 800; Kulm and Schweller 1977). The study area lies within the second of five longitudinal seismic provinces subdividing the Andean Cordillera (Barazangi and Isacks 1976; Sillitoe 1974). Here subduction of the Nazca Plate begins approximately 200 km directly seaward of the mouths of the coastal valleys and it passes less than 100 km beneath the watershed, underthrusting at a rate of about 10 cm per year (Toksoz 1975, Table 1). The nature and magnitude of late Holocene and recent tectonic movements affecting the study area can be measured in the zone where the high-flexure scarp emerges from the sea near the mouth of the Rio Santa at 9'. These measures include (1) the most devastating historic earthquake in the hemisphere, epicentered approximately 30 km seaward (Ericksen, Plafker, and Concha 1970; Plafker, Ericksen, and Concha 1971); (2) prior gradual vertical movement of the coastline at an average rate of 1.8 cm per annum (Wyss 1978); and (3) five millennia of shoreline displacement totaling 5 km horizontally and more than 10 m vertically (Sandweiss, Rollins, and Richardson 1981). Within the study area, maximum shoreline displacement has occurred immediately north of the Rio Santa. It has been carbon 14 dated through molluskan fauna associated with uplifted beach surfaces as occurring entirely after about 3200 B.C. Displacement is expressed as a sequence of eight to nine low regressional marine terraces or beach ridges associated with horizontally stratified occupations (ibid). Displacement has totaled more than 5 km horizontally (east-west) and more than 10 m vertically (Cossio and Jaen 1967). Even though the Andes are rising faster in the south than in the north, and horizontal and vertical littoral displacements diminish northward from 9' to 6' south latitude, there is little reason to suspect that movement of the high-flexure scarp at 9' did not and does not carry up to 6'. Broadly synchronous tectonic movement over wide areas of the cordillera has been observed recently in Colombia (Herd et al. 1981) and was observed by Charles Darwin (1839:379) when HMS Beagle was off the Chilean coast. The great scarp has assumed its high-flexure configuration because the Cordillera Negra is rising faster inland than along the coast (James 1973; Myers 1975) as a result of, among other things, the compressional force of the ocean plate colliding with and underthrusting the watershed. The crystalline bedrock of the cordillera fractures much like glass struck by a BB, but on a vast scale. Fracturing forms a hierarchical fault lattice and it is along this lattice that crustal blocks shift and cumulative ground slope displacement takes place. Because planes of fracture and slippage represent structurally weak points, runoff and desert drainage take place along their lines (Asfaw 1982).

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It is predictable that both the highest statistical incidence of slope alteration in abandoned canals and the largest absolute slope displacements will occur in the area of the high-flexure scarp where the channels approach and cross fault-formed dry drainages (que bradas) (Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1982, 1983). On the south side of the Rio Moche, where the river exits the scarp, there is a riverbank profile more than 12 m high. Peat beds near the base of the profile, carbon 14 dated to approximately 1000 B.C., exhibit faulting and vertical displacement exceeding 1.5 m. In the area of the profile, there are two abandoned canal systems that exhibit low-level uphill slope displacements (to 0 and 0.75' respectively) (Ortloff, Moseley, and Feldman 1983). Thus, movement of the high-flexure scarp is documented at 8' in the Moche drainage as well as 9' south latitude near the Santa drainage. The Chicama-Moche Intervalley Canal runs along the scarp base and crosses numerous quebradas and dry washes. Significantly, proponents of landscape immutability (Pozorski and Pozorski 1982) have gone to considerable lengths to document the "fact" that it is precisely where the canal approaches and crosses drainages that Chimu engineers regularly misjudged the slope and built uphill canal sections. The slope alteration of these sections does not exceed 1.5' uphill; this displacement represents total cumulative alteration since the time of canal construction and abandonment 800 to 1,000 years ago. If most of the strain generated by tectonic underthrusting is released by creep or lowlevel seismic movement, then most slope alteration affecting the archeological record has built up gradually. There is one measure of such gradual motion within the study region. During the decade from 1960 to 1970, the coastline at 9' south latitude slowly bowed up 12 cm, then gradually subsided 6 cm. Thus, total vertical oscillation averaged 1.8 cm per year (Wyss 1978). Gradual vertical movement of 1 cm to 2 cm per year is mechanically compatible with the 10-cm-per-annum rate of sea floor subduction because underthrusting takes place at a shallow dip of 10'. Thus, the sea floor is sliding under the watershed to a greater degree than it is pushing the cordillera up. It is important to understand that the mechanisms of HAC rest with gradual movement and small cumulative gradient changes. That considerable tectonic activity is continuous and gradual is not an expectation of the general public, which associates tectonic activity with earthquakes and seismic events; nor is it generally expected that movement takes place without surface fault displacement. Applying expectations of surface seismic movement like that of the San Andreas Fault to the Intervalley Canal course leads quite logically to the conclusion that this type of activity is not evident and therefore the landscape has remained immutable (Pozorski and Pozorski 1982). In May 1970, the most devastating historic earthquake (7.7 on the Richter scale) in the New World made it evident that the Cordillera Negra is seismically very active. Most activity is deep within the earth's crust east of the continental divide and does not lead to surface fault displacement within the study area (Barazangi and Isacks 1976). Such displacement is by no means absent, but it is rare, and seismic landscape alteration goes on without evident surface faulting. The 1970 event did not produce recognized surface faulting, but it did produce alterations of note, including 10 cm of coastal subsidence at one bay, sediment spreading that tilted many buildings, and warping of railroad tracks into wavelike metal strands with 1' up and down slopes. In another case, the Great Tumaco Earthquake of 1979 dropped broad sections of the Colombian coast by 1.5 m without surface faulting (Herd et al. 1981). The foregoing discussion is not meant to imply that the nature of Holocene tectonic activity in the Cordillera Negra is known in detail. Rather, the point is that movement of the high-flexure fault system during the span of human agricultural endeavors is unequivocal. While this ongoing tectonic activity does not conform to popular stereotypes about earthquakes and faulting, it is entirely consistent with what is known about the long-term

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growth of the range. In turn, ongoing earth movement and consequent ground slope change may be expected to affect the hydrologcal regime and produce change in patterns of runoff and agriculture. The Hydrological Regime Normally there is no annual precipitation below 1,500 m elevation due to a constant temperature inversion along the coast. As a result, the lower 40%-50% of the watershed lies within the world's driest desert (Lettau and Lettau 1978). Rains on the desert occur only in association with strong El Niiio perturbations of normal ocean-atmosphere conditions. The statistical periodicity of such strong perturbations is about once per 15 to 16 years at 8' south latitude (Nials et al. 1979). However, not all strong El Niiios produce showers, and major rains (which last occurred in 1925) may fall less than once per century or two. Such major deluges fall on an unvegetated landscape that may have experienced decades of ongoing tectonic alteration. Although cumulative ground slope change may be less than l o ,any movement of the crustal blocks will have placed the normally dry desert drainages out of equilibrium with coastal rivers and land-to-sea level changes. When the destabilized hydrological regime is supercharged by flooding, erosion and mass wasting can occur on a scale so vast that major Holocene incidents -most recently about A.D. 1100-have been misidentified as products of earlier glacial epochs (Moseley, Feldman, and Ortloff 1981). Total precipitation measured at the mouth of the Moche Valley between 1943 and 1970 was only 46 mm, an annual average of 1.7 mm, which is unsufficient to sustain plant growth. Only the upper 52% of the Moche basin collects annual precipitation. Highland rainfall is markedly seasonal, with more than 75% falling within 25% of the calendar year. River discharge is consequently seasonal, ranging from 10 to 34 m3/sec during the maximum flow months of January to May but dropping to a trickle during the remainder of the year. For three-quarters of the year, all discharge is absorbed by large-scale irrigation agriculture. In the lower valley, this farming is today sustained by six river-fed primary canals-three on each side of the valley. For convenience, these are designated N or S for north or south of the river and numbered 1 through 3 from the lowest near the coast to the highest near the bedrock scarp canyon at the valley neck (Figure 3). Because there is no coastal rainfall, the lower valley water table is recharged by river runoff and has a high-low cycle peaking between June and September, well after the river has crested. Of the approximately 19,950 ha of land under cultivation in the lower drainage, groundwater irrigates about 16% (ONERN 1973). It is exploited through channelized springs or "pukio" canals, pumps, and sunken gardens. The latter are created by excavating planting surfaces down to a level at which natural soil moisture sustains cultivation. Sunken gardens are an efficient agricultural technique, although they are restricted to areas of high water table by the greater labor expenditures needed to excavate them where the water table is deeper. Groundwater supports not only agriculture but city life. The urban center of Trujillo, founded by the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, is now supplied with potable water from wells. On the north side of the valley, the pre-Hispanic metropolis of Chan Chan likewise relied on groundwater. Chan Chan was supplied by more than 125 "walk-in-wells," which are large rectangular excavations, two to five or more stories in depth. Switch-back ramp systems along the sidewall allowed people access to the water, which was carried out in vessels. In overview, the Moche Basin and its agricultural area fit within a north-to-southgraded sequence of large to small river valleys with agricultural areas of proportional size

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MOCHE VALLEY
0 1 2 3 4 5
KILOMETERS

CANALS: IV MERVALLEY N 3 MOAO N 2 VICHANSAO N MOCHICA 1 P PUKlO 53 HUATAF'E 5 2 STO. DOMING0

1 HUANCHACO 2 R O SECO 3 ESPERANZA

4 ARENAL 5 CACIOUE

Figure 3. Map of the lower Moche Valley, showing major canals, abandoned field areas, and maximum extent of sunken gardens.

(Table I, Figure 2). This pattern begins with the Rio Chancay (6.5O south latitude) and with one exception (Rio Zaiia) continues to the Rio Santa (go south latitude), where the tectonic province ends and the pattern is broken. The Rio Santa is the largest river basin along the entire Andean desert coast, and though it carries 14 times the volume of the Rio Moche, it supports a significantly (43%) smaller agricultural area.

The Littoral Zone

Agriculture can be analyzed as an artificial extension of the natural hydrological regime. Of mechanical necessity, this regime behaves in response to ground slope alteration and change in land-to-sea level relationships established at river mouths and along the littoral zone. Due to eustatic and tectonic change, the littoral zone, the river mouths, and the entire hydrological regime of the Cordillera Negra have never reached a stable equilibrium during the course of human occupation. With the onset of glacial meltback some 15,000 years ago, the level of the ocean rose an estimated 85 to 135 m, and in the course of 10,000years, submerged a more than 75-km-widestrip of once-exposed coastal plain between 6 and 9 south latitude (Richardson 1981). Rising sea-to-landlevels put O O river mouths into aggradational regimes, while a submergent littoral zone generated high groundwater conditions inland.

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I'AB1.E 1. PHYSICAI. CHARACTERIS-rICS 01: 1 ' H t RIVERS 01: T H t PERlJViAh' N O R T H COAS1'

River Chancay Zaiia Jequetepeque Chicama Moche Virh Chao Santa

Basin Irrigated size (km2) area (km2)

Length (km)

Flow volume (m3x106)

150 m Elevation % Gradient (km from (1000-0 mouth) masl)

Ocean level rise began to stabilize about 5,000 years ago (ibid.) but the watershed did not. Rather, there was a rapid reversal of hydrological conditions in the Cordillera N e g ~ a because tectonic underthrusting of the watershed continued. Whereas the sea rose faster than the land up to about 3000 B.C., the land has risen relative to the sea for the last 5,000 years. Rising land-to-sea levels and a receding littoral zone put rivers into a degrading regime, with associated lowering of groundwater levels inland of the emergent coastline. The change from a rising sea level to a rising land level represents a major "shock" to the Holocene landscape and is demarcated by a prominent wave-cut sea cliff that is largely continuous the length of the coast from approximately 6.5O to 9' south latitude. There are no Tertiary or Quaternary marine deposits or coastline features inland of this cliff (Cossio and Jaen 1967). The first camps and settlements to occur on the cliff-top are carbon 14 dated to between 3200 and 2000 B.C. (Cardenas 1977-78; Bird 1951; Pozorski and Pozorski 1979a; Sandweiss, Rollins, and Richardson 1981). The regressional terrace/beach ridge sequences lie seaward of the cliff, as does the modern littoral. The distance between cliff and modern littoral grades from 5 km at 9' to a few tens of meters at 6.5' and could reflect decreasing rates of angularity of uplift, with greater vertical rise in the south. Accompanying the south-to-north decrease in sea cliff and littoral displacement is a truncation of the terrace and beach ridge sequence. At the Rio Moche, uplifted beach surface remnants 8 m , 3 m, and 2 m in elevation are preserved on the northern, lee sides of fault-formed bays bracketing the valley mouth (Cossio and Jaen 1967). The earliest occupation tentatively associated with the highest marine surface is dated by ceramics to the latter half of the first millennium B.C. Late Moche phase and subsequent Chimu phase occupations are present on the lower, later beach surfaces (Nials et al. 1979).

The Riuer
If the coastline and valley interior have risen in recent millennia, then of mechanical necessity the Rio Moche will have downcut its channel to seek equilibrium with the sea level, which has not changed appreciably. The river, from its mouth inland to the base of the high-flexure scarp, is not deeply incised. However, beginning about 6 krn inland at the scarp base the river is cutting laterally southward as well as down and has exposed a vertical profile more than 12 m high that runs almost continuously up to the bedrock

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canyon of the valley neck. This profile has been studied in detail near its beginning about 7 km above the river mouth. At the base of the stratigraphic column are faulted peat beds (carbon 14 dated at about 1000 B.C.) overlain by fluvial deposits with ceramic inclusions thought to date to about 500 B.C. (Sciscento 1982). The upper half of the column comprises stabilized aeolian sands that were formerly farmed and include furrow and feeder canal remnants. The top of the profile has ceramic inclusions dated on stylistic grounds to the Early Chimu phase at around A.D. 1000 or somewhat earlier. The top of the column has been eroded and deflated, and immediately behind the profile bank are yardangs, or buttelike erosional remnants of sandy loam, several meters high that contain occasional inclusions of Early Chimu ceramics. Unincorporated Early and Middle Chimu materials are present as surface scatters on deflated surfaces between yardangs and document onset of river entrenchment and surface erosion before Middle Chimu times. Triggering mechanisms for the Early Chimu onset of erosion and river downcutting are not understood in detail, but tectonic activity is likely. The stratigraphic column cannot be traced downstream of the high-flexure scarp and thus cannot be tied to a specific uplifted beach surface. If the shift to river downcutting is associated with tectonic activity that also created a local uplifted beach surface, this surface should be the 2-m terrace or a lower one. However, a small coastal displacement need not mean an equally small inland displacement because the cordillera is rising faster inland than along the coast. The Early Chimu shift to surface deflation and river downcutting must either be earlier than or coincident with a massive episode of El Nzno flooding and erosion that is estimated to have occurred about A.D. 1100 (Nials et al. 1979). This flooding scoured out more than a meter of valley floor sediments. There is tentative independent archeological verification of the flooding at 6' south latitude (Shimada 1981), and it is again associated with erosion rather than deposition. The Chotuna complex of monumental architecture (6' south latitude) experienced 1'-2' of ground slope alteration during the Chimu occupation at a time bracketed between A.D. 900 and 1200 (Donnan and Ortloff 1982). This evidence supports a hypothesis of fairly widespread tectonic destabilization prior to river entrenchment and erosive flooding. In overview, tectonic destabilization, river downcutting, and erosive flooding cannot as yet be tightly cross-dated to unequivocally prove a mechanically coherent scenario of Early Chimu landscape change. However, the fact of river entrenchment is unequivocal and its hydrological consequences are evident.

The Water Table

Because river flow charges groundwater and because the littoral zone sets the water table level in the lower Moche Valley, angular uplift, increased gradients, and river downcutting would, expectably, alter water table conditions. Vertical change in groundwater conditions can be monitored by the horizontal distribution and positioning of two agricultural techniques: spring-fed canals and sunken gardens. Their spatial configuration prior to the recent spread of mechanically pumped wells is documented by aerial photographic coverage of the lower valley taken in 1942. The earliest historical map of the valley's agricultural configuration, made in 1760, shows two spring-fed canal systems north and west of the river (Kosok 1965:70). The highest system was fed from a pond located about 75 m above sea level, 12 km inland and 1.5 km north of the river. By 1942 this system was no longer operative, and the area it once irrigated was supplied by the major river-fed canal on the north side of the valley (canal Nl). The lowest canal system fed by groundwater was identified in the 1760 map as coming from a pond located about 40 m above sea level, 9 km inland and 2 km north

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of the river. By 1942 this system (the Pukio System) was not fed from a pond, but from two springs or seeps approximately 1 km apart. Today it is fed only by the lower spring (Figure 3). Sunken gardens, which rely on high groundwater conditions, extended inland at least 4 km and sustained farming in the lower central sector of the valley at the opening of the Chimu occupation. By 1942 this technique had dramatically contracted coastward, and all sunken garden farming was limited to a region within 1 km or less of the shoreline, principally seaward of the wave-cut cliff. Areas formerly cultivated by groundwater exploitation were irrigated from river- and spring-fed canals. This coastward encroachment of irrigation agriculture on areas formerly gardened with groundwater has continued in recent decades without the significant salinization problems that would be expected if the water table had not dropped, improving drainage. A measure of this drop is reflected by remnants of abandoned Early Chimu gardens situated 4.5 km inland that now lie 10-12 m above the contemporary water table level. While this vertical drop of more than 10 m is a modern measure that includes the effects of mechanical pumping, the horizontal contraction of groundwater agriculture that preceded pumping is best explained as a corollary of coastal uplift, river downcutting, and a lowering water table.

T h e Canals
When agriculture is analyzed as an artificial extension of the hydrological regime, the chronic complaints of Andean farmers about river erosion and canal intakes problems are not without reason. As a river downcuts, canal intakes lose efficiency and must be reworked to take in water. The N3 intake abuts the downstream side of a bedrock hill, and although the canal has a 2.5 m3/sec flow capacity, the intake silts up, leading to social accusations of poor maintenance (ONERN 1973) for what is a mechanical problem of slow flow. The intake of the N2 canal has been rebuilt a number of times, each time farther upstream. Within the last two decades it has merged with the N3 intake. This combined intake cannot be shifted farther upstream because of the bedrock block. The N1 intake has also migrated upriver, but its initial channel runs beside a terrace occupied by the N2, so it cannot be reworked without undercutting the higher canal. The S1 intake abuts a bedrock obstacle, and shifts in the river have forced the abandonment of a concrete intake in favor of an earth-bank intake of rustic construction. Local farmers hold that the efficiency of the canal is greatly impaired by the present intake, which must be continually reconstructed (Webber 1980). All of these changes are simply symptoms of ongoing gradual tectonic destabilization of the watershed-canals cannot be stable if the river that feeds them is changing.

T h e Mechanics of Collapse
Of the water a canal takes in, less than 45% reaches fields and only about 16% is actually utilized in crop growth (West 1981; USDA 1955). Thus, efficiency in open channel flow design entails moving the maximum amount of water the minimum distance to reach the largest possible planting area. For steep-gradient rivers of the Cordillera Negra, maximum design efficiency is represented by canals that transport and distribute water along a course perpendicular to the rivers. This configuration expresses a balanced relationship between separate functions of supply and distribution. Intake capability, c slope, and channel hydraulic configuration set maximum limits on ~ h volume of water that a canal can supply. However, the maximum limit on the size of the planting area over which this supply can be distributed is the downslope area included between the canal and the river. The "angle of reach" between canal and river thus establishes the

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distance of transport relative to the area of planting surface: a small angle of reach requires a longer canal to encompass the same area (Figure 4). If a canal intake feeds from an entrenched river, then its initial lead-off channel must slope downstream at a low angle of reach before the course can exit the confines of the downcut landscape at an elevation suitable for perpendicular course placement. Given water loss in transport through seepage and evaporation, the perpendicular course distance that a canal can supply is limited by the distance of low angle lead-off, and leadoff distance is relative to depth of river entrenchment. Water supply to the canal will decrease if the intake and lead-off channel must be reworked in response to ongoing river downcutting that strands the intake above the entrenching stream flow. By reworking and extending the stranded end of the lead-off channel upstream from its original position and intersecting the river at a higher elevation, a new intake can be constructed to maintain the canal supply, but at the expense of increasing low-angle transport distance. In other words, as the lead-off channel is extended farther and farther upstream, it more nearly parallels the river, leading to a locally small angle of reach between canal and river. As downcutting proceeds, upstream extension can be repeated, and intakes will "migrate" upriver until eventually a bedrock obstacle is encountered. In the narrow bedrock valley neck of the Rio Moche and other coastal rivers the task of tunneling or trenching through crystalline rock curtails lead-off channel extension, and aqueducting around valley neck obstacles is inhibited by lateral river movement that undercuts the canal's support structure. When bedrock abutment of the intake occurs, supply can be maintained only by lowering the intake vertically to the river level through trenching and recutting the intake and lead-off channel to a lower slope. However, decreasing channel bed slope for a fixed canal cross-sectional area decreases the total supply flow rate. This set of problems promotes new construction downstream where there is sedimentary fill and room for intake adjustment in response to further river changes. In a context of continuing entrenchment, this fosters successive downstream construction and replacement of canal systems. Through time, irrigation agriculture retreats coastward at descending elevations in a steplike manner. Entrenchment eventually reaches the stage where the distance between the intake and the coast is insufficient for lead-off channels to pull out of the downcut landscape and swing laterally to perpendicular course placement. Therefore, in overview, the angle of reach and area of irrigation agriculture in any given valley are relative to its degree or depth of river entrenchment. Thus, the Rio Santa, which has an extraordinarily large discharge volume, supports an extraordinarily small agricultural area because it is the most deeply entrenched river on the north coast.

OPTIMUM STRATEGY

MAXIMUM ANGULAR REACH

Figure 4. Relationships between canal slope, angle of reach, and land area irrigated. The optimum situation involves a minimum slope and a maximum angular reach.

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Here it is critical to realize that HAC seeks to explain agrarian collapse not in terms of changes in quantity of water but rather in terms of changes in the distribution of water.

Limitations on the Data

It must be understood that the hypothesis of agrarian collapse has both hydrological components related to the mechanical consequences of river downcutting, and geological components related to the causes of river entrenchment and ground slope alteration. The former are both better documented and better understood than the latter. The mechanics of collapse will ensue regardless of the physical cause of stream entrenchment. Alternative causes of downcutting, such as deforestation and changing precipitation patterns, which are considered elsewhere (Moseley et al. 1983), cannot be excluded as causes until the Rio Moche profile is traced downstream of the scarp crossing and securely anchored to an uplifted beach surface. However, there is ample evidence of tectonic activity and ground slope alteration in the form of recent shoreline displacement, canals that run uphill, and architectural monuments exhibiting slope and orientation alterations. Thus the advantage of the tectonic hypothesis is that it can readily account for these latter phenomena as well as river entrenchment. HISTORICAL SCENARIO If tectonically induced ground slope change alters water distribution, which in turn affects agricultural configurations, then human history need not be entirely divorced from hydrological history. In the context of extreme aridity, historical overlap in the spatial positioning of people, plants, and water is not an unreasonable expectation. Such a scenario is developed for the Moche Valley after a brief consideration of preservation patterns.

Preservation Putt erning

Agriculture has great antiquity in northern Peru. Cultigens have been recovered from cave deposits dating between about 8000 and 5000 B.C. (Lynch 1980). On the basis of increased vegetable content of coastal middens and the appearance of inland residential communities, large-scale agricultural irrigation of desert lands can be inferred to have begun by at least 1500 B.C. (Feldman 1980; Moseley 1974; Pozorski 1976). At present, irrigation canals reach a much smaller area than they did in the past. Except for the S1, the major canals of the Moche Valley do not end where they now cease to carry water. Rather, the courses extend out into the desert and enclose approximately 35%-40% more land than is currently farmed (Moseley 1978). To understand the surviving sample of abandoned hydraulic works, it is useful to make an analogy with glacial geology. As ice or agriculture advances over a landscape, the evidence of earlier, smaller advances and contractions is largely destroyed. However, as glaciers melt or agriculture collapses, they leave behind moraines or canals and other evidence of retreat. While there may have been more than one early agicultural advance and retreat in the Cordillera Negra, most abandoned agricultural structures of wellpreserved and easily recognizable form date after about A.D. 500 and pertain to the Moche phase V occupation, as well as the Early, Middle, and Late Chimu phases, when the political hegemony of Chan Chan dominated the north coast. Pre-Hispanic agricultural works survive, in analyzable form, outside the area of contemporary agriculture, and therefore reflect agrarian collapse at the distal ends of irrigation systems. Along the entrenching river, evidence of abandoned intakes and lead-off adjustment has been destroyed by river movement or masked by continuing cultivation.

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Canals
Long-term changes in irrigation and hydrology can be most graphically traced in the vicinity of Chan Chan on the north side of the valley where three pampas form the largest expanse of flat arable land in the lower drainage. These changes not only shaped the history of agriculture but also structured the growth of the Chimu capital between its founding around A.D. 800 and its subjugation by the Inca about A.D. 1470. The metropolis developed around sequentially built palace-compounds that were first erected near the beach above the wave-cut sea-cliff on Pampa Esperanza, a flat plain that extends inland some 8 km (Kolata 1982: Moseley and Kolata 1982a, b). The surface of the pampa is composed of loose, sandy sediments that overlie a lightly consolidated colluvial conglomerate, and the well-drained pampa is suited to canal irrigation. East and inland of the earliest palace compounds, the ground surface is lower, sandy sediments prevail, and relatively high water table conditions favored sunken garden farming. In a sense, the city was founded at a point where canal irrigation, sunken gardening, and the coastline converged (Figure 5a). During Moche V times the lower half of Pampa Esperanza was under irrigation, fed by a presumed branch of what could be either the N3 or N2 primary canal. (Urban growth of Trujillo has destroyed the connecting channels, making it impossible to verify the exact routing.) Next, the upper portion of the plain was reclaimed by canals associated with an early phase of the N2 system. Thus, when monumental construction began at Chan Chan, irrigated land surrounded the young city. The canal system was expanded north and west in several stages. At first this was done by simply lengthening existing canals. Later, however, new canals were cut at higher elevations to encompass still more terrain (Figure 5b). The expanded canal system then underwent major remodeling, with masonry-lined channels replacing earlier earth-bank channels (Figure 5c). The entire irrigation system was destroyed by catastrophic flash flooding and erosional mass wasting around A.D. 1100, when the third palace compound at Chan Chan was the focus of urban activity. The masonry canal system was rebuilt, but with lower flow capacities. However, the reconstructed system delivered little, then less, and ultimately no water to Pampa Esperanza and the lands north and west of Chan Chan. A five-phase sequence of canal profiles at the distal end of the irrigation system shows decreasing flow through the first three phases, and then a marked decline in the capacity of the two postflood reconstruction canal phases (Ortloff, Feldman, and Moseley 1982). Closer to the river, excavations across the N2 near its modern terminus revealed four superimposed channels. The earliest earth-bank channel had a 9.6-m3/sec estimated flow capacity. It was replaced by a canal of roughly half this capacity, a change that probably reflects short-term alternate water routing, because this second channel was replaced by a large masonry-lined channel with an estimated 10.2-m3/sec capacity. After destruction by flooding prompted reconstruction, the final channel was built with a 3.1-m3/sec capacity, which is essentially that of the contemporary N2. The maximum capacity of the largest modern canal, the N1, is 10.0 m3/sec, which is about the maximum that the river can effectively supply. Therefore, the N1 replacement of the N2 after flooding does not reflect in canal design intent or capacity a decline in available water. Rather, river erosion associated with flooding may be argued to have curtailed the intake capacity of the N2. The five-phase profile sequence at the distal end of the N2 system indicates decreasing delivery capacity before A.D. 1100, and flooding must have exaggerated the basic problems generated by river downcutting. Atrophy of the reconstructed N2 system apparently prompted construction of the r Chicama-Moche Intervalley Canal. This canal, which was more than 70 k n long, was intended to resupply lands north and west of the city that lay beyond the low angular reach

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Figure 5 . Growth of Chan Chan and adjacent irrigation. Occupied compounds at Chan Chan are shown in solid black, older compounds in outline. The dot spacing indicates intensity of cultivation.

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of the N1. Building an intervalley canal is a truly massive undertaking by any standards, past or present. Yet, rather than channel Chicama water via a relatively short route directly to the western fields, the Intervalley Canal followed a circuitous route that allowed its junction with the dry N2 to be placed centrally above Chan Chan at the inland head of Pampa Esperanza, seemingly at the expense of building a canal longer than necessary. While the Intervalley Canal was being constructed, Pampa Esperanza was left unirrigated and Chan Chan expanded inland, onto formerly farmed terrain. During the time of the sixth palace enclosure, construction of Chan Chan's great north wall marked the incorporation of vast tracts of formerly farmed land into the urban landscape. Feeder canals were laid out north and west of the city wall to receive Chicama waters from the Intervalley Canal, and the atrophied N2 canal, no longer able to supply Pampa Esperanza, was apparently intended to water fields northeast of the capital and in the interior of the valley (Figure 5d). However, the Intervalley Canal was never completed, and the canals on the westernmost plains were never reactivated. Irrigation of the western plains only resumed much later, around the time of the last two palace compounds, when the N1 canal, built to replace the N2, was cut through the city wall and used to selectively irrigate the interiors of all but the last palaces (Figure 5e). Recut today at a slightly lower elevation than its original channel, the N1 canal now supports farming in the northern portion of Chan Chan's ruins (Figure 5f).
Sunken Gardens

When Chan Chan was founded, sunken garden farming extended at least 4 km inland to the center of the valley. Because remnants of these inland gardens are more than 10 m above the present water table, their original use was presumably predicated on significantly higher groundwater conditions being prevalent before the Early Chimu onset of river downcutting that is evident in the riverbank profile. Following the onset of river entrenchment and after flooding aggravated downcutting and disrupted irrigation, inland gardening began to contract as groundwater lowered relative to the lower river channel. As inland gardens dropped from use, those near the coast were deepened and expanded. Gardens began to encroach on the southeastern sector of the city, where groundwater conditions are highest. By the time of the last two palace compounds, massive "royal gardens" were being cut through the thick alluvium behind the sea cliff, requiring enormous labor expenditures. The emphasis on increasing the numbers of sunken gardens is an expectable response to the decreasing availability of irrigated land resulting from the contraction of the canal system (see Parsons 1968). However, like irrigation, the total area of sunken gardening contracted through time. The pattern of shrinkage for both agricultural techniques, on both sides of the river, has been one of contraction back toward the river and down-slope toward the sea.
Potable Water

Understanding the process of hydrological change explains not only agrarian contraction but also the configuration of the urban development on the desert. The growth of Chan Chan was tied to the hydrological regime by its wells. When the city was founded, the aquifer supplying fresh water to the metropolis was charged by up-slope irrigation on Pampa Esperanza. Expanding the irrigation system maintained an artificially high water table, mitigated against the water table's seasonal cycle, and allowed relatively shallow wells to support inland urban expansion. When dwindling water supplies from the postflood N2 canal triggered construction of the Intervalley Canal, a critical design

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feature was placement of the canal junction inland centrally above Chan Chan, so that seepage from renewed irrigation would recharge the city's aquifer (Day 1973). Because this intervalley water never materialized, the land enclosed by the city's great north wall, intended for urban development, could not sustain settlement except by means of unusually deep wells. Continued decline in the water table generated by the combined effects of lack of irrigation and ongoing tectonic uplift halted inland urban expansion and forced the city to grow successively back upon itself toward the coast, where declining groundwater was more accessible. When a new master canal, the N1, replaced the atrophied N2, it ran at too low an elevation and reached too little of Pampa Esperanza for reactivated irrigation to significantly recharge the urban aquifer. The rationale for selective Late Chimu irrigation of only the interiors of the palaces is elusive, but nonetheless symbolic of changing economic, political, and urban fortunes affected by a changing hydraulic regime. Economic Patterns The mechanics of collapse produce an economic pattern resembling the closing fan of a Spanish dancer: the maximum angular reach and spread of agriculture decreases and closes sequentially. The spatial patterning of collapse is most graphic north of the Moche River where there is open flat land. As in the adjacent drainages, bedrock foothills south of the river have inhibited the southern spread of irrigation, but in condensed form the same collapse pattern is present. The Cordillera Negra is rising faster in the south than north, and there is evidence of greater Holocene shoreline displacemrnt at go south latitude than at 6' south latitude. In the context of graded differences in uplift and slope change it is not fortuitous that the configuration of agriculture changes systematically north to south from the pattern of an "open fan" at 6' to that of a "closed fan" at 9' south latitude (Figure 2). This progressive contraction in agricultural area is not structured by the relative volumes of river water in different drainages. The Rio Santa is the largest river in the entire desert watershed and carries almost five times the water of the next largest river, yet it supports one of the smallest areas of irrigated land. What structures north-to-south agricultural contraction is relative uplift and degree of river entrenchment. The north-to-south closing of the agricultural fan is a modern synchronic pattern; however, it can be used for purposes of visualizing the evolution of agriculture in diachronic. developmental stages. Thus, the configuration of Moche Valley agriculture at about A.D. 1000 resembled the open fan presently found in the next valley to the north. Alternatively, as uplift continues, the agricultural configuration of the future will come to resemble the closed fans presently found in valleys immediately to the south. IMPLICATIONS In assessing the broader implications of agrarian collapse in the Cordillera Negra, it is important to distinguish between the historical scenario, which is still vague, and the mechanical principles that weave it together, which are not vague. More than a century ago scientists began to recognize that continental ice sheets had moved across the landscape in a mechanical manner. However, the nature, direction, and rates of movement were not known in detail, and there was little awareness of the human consequences of past ice movement. Only two decades ago was it recognized that continental and oceanic plates moved above the asthenosphere. Because the tectonic paradigm is new, the characteristics of related crustal movement are not known in detail and there is little awareness of the human consequences of gradual earth movement. The human consequences of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions were recognized long before science

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acknowledged either glacial or tectonic dynamics. This is because people easily recognize things that can be seen to move, but have great difficulty acknowledging things moving very gradually and "unseen," such as ice or earth. Denying or accepting gradual earth movement in the Andes provides alternative premises for explaining phenomena such as tilted monuments, uphill canals, abandoned fields, and eroding rivers, but not uplifted beaches. Explanations such as poor bricklaying and substandard construction, bad surveying and optical illusion, and rapid deforestation can account for these phenomena but at the expense of judging indigenous peoples and polities inept and primitive. However, human activity cannot be invoked to account for coastline change, which can only be explained by movement of the land or the sea. It is physically impossible to alter, even gradually and unseen, the elevation of the littoral zone without altering all fluid and flow levels in a watershed. Likewise, tectonic alteration of the coastline is unlikely without altering ground slopes. The "hypothesis of agrarian collapse" is simply a mechanical corollary of this situation. Hydrological instability is accentuated by high rates of crustal displacement, which, in the Peruvian case, may result in offsets of the littoral zone tens of meters vertically and hundreds horizontally in the course of five millennia. Where coastal displacement, albeit of different character but similar magnitude and antiquity, has been documented, as it has been for the Near Eastern Sinai Subplate (Neev and Friedman 1978), the history of agriculture is unlikely to be entirely independent of changing hydrological regimes. Change may be recorded by either emergent coastlines, as in Peru, or with submergent coastlines that lead to river aggradation, flooding, high groundwater levels, poor soil drainage, and salinization of irrigated lands, as is documented in detail for the lower Tigris and Euphrates drainages. Because these rivers fed ancient irrigation systems that cultivated a tectonically active landscape, it is not surprising that decades ago geologists documented the presence of numerous uplifted canals and slope-altered channels (Lees and Falcon 1952). Even where the Holocene geological history is not known in detail, hydrological and agricultural homeostasis are unlikely in a region near active seismic or volcanic belts. For example, there is a prominent fault zone cutting through Central America near the Mayan heartland. The magnitude of the interaction dwarfs that of California's San Andreas Fault. Not only has this fault zone acted as the Caribbean-North American plate boundary (Muehlberger and Ritchie 1975), where movement is reflected as disturbance of the groundwater regime (Erdlac and Anderson 1982:66), but both plates (whose longterm direction of movement is antithetical) are being underthrust along their Pacific margin by the Cocos Oceanic Plate, which is moving at a rate similar to that of the Nazca Plate in northern Peru (Toksoz 1975). Expectably, the high incidence of seismic and volcanic activity in Central America parallels that of the Andean cordillera. The abandoned cities and vast agricultural works of the ancient Mayans lie atop this tectonically active landscape. Perhaps, it may not prove entirely coincidental that much of the culturally abandoned landscape, expressing what archeologists call the "Maya Collapse," overlies a bedrock bulge that geologists call the "Maya Rise." Earth movements can never replace human causality or social explanation of a cultural "collapse," any more than glaciation in and of itself can explain the Pleistocene archeological record. In this vein, the hypothesis of agrarian collapse is not intended to be an exercise in environmental causality. Rather, it is an exposition of mechanical principles underlying changing hydrological regimes that agricultural endeavors must adjust to. Many competing theories-ranging from deforestation and soil depletion through agrarian mismanagement to social revolt, foreign conquest, and demographic disrup-

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tion -have arisen t o a c c o u n t f o r agricultural collapse. H A C does n o t c o m p e t e with these; r a t h e r it elucidates a n interrelated set of background conditions t h a t m a k e m a n y s u c h theories complementary a n d intelligible a s adaptive responses t o c h a n g i n g selection pressures t h a t a r e mechanically driven by g r a d u a l , unseen movement of t h e e a r t h . NOTES

Acknowledgments. T h e research underlying this paper was supported by National Science Foundation grants BNS 76-24538 and BNS 77-24901 and by the Frederick Henry Prince Trust. The program of excavations was under the direction of Thomas and Shelia Pozorski. I am indebted to Patricia Dodson, Robert Feldman, Alfredo Narvaez, and Charles Ortloff for untiring assistance in the field, in the analysis, and in the writing of this paper. I would also like to thank Thomas Anderson for reviewing my geological interpretations.
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