What does an El Nino event look like?  This complex and volatile geophysical phenomenon is difficult to capture, measure, or describe in photographs, numbers, or words; what did the ancient indigenous residents of Western South America make of it, and its devastating impact on local ecologies, economies, and the built environment?  How did this understanding allow them, not only to survive, but to thrive, and to build societies of increasing complexity for several millenia?  And finally, as such mega-weather events become more common globally, what might we learn from this part of the archaeological record?

Mary Weismantel is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She has published on “slow seeing” at Chavín de Huantar, on sexual themes in Moche ceramics, as on the site of Çatalhoyük.  Additionally, she is the author of numerous articles and two books on her ethnographic research: Food Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes (1989), and the award-winning Cholas and Pishtacos: Tales of Race and Sex in the Andes (2001).