Farmers of old relied on El Niño

EVERY FOUR or five years, vast quantities of warm water build up along the west coast of South America. This phenomenon, El Niño, creates storms that cause devastating floods. The result is costly. In 2017, for instance, El Niño shut down northern Peru’s sugar-cane business.Modern farmers view El Niño stoically. They use money saved in good years to rebuild in bad ones. But history suggests it need not be like that. In a paper published recently in the , Ari Caramanica, an archaeologist at University of the Pacific, in Lima, shows how it used to be done. And the answer seems to be, “better”.