Profile of Michael E. Moseley

Abstract

Archaeologist Michael E. Moseley not only studies ancient natural disasters, but he also cheerfully lives through modern ones, too. In 1970, while working on an excavation site in northern Peru, a 7.8-Richter magnitude earthquake hit, with the epicenter just miles away. After the aftershocks subsided, Moseley shoveled out his collapsed excavation, resumed work, and lived without electricity for 8 months. Two years later, he experienced devastating Peruvian El Nino floods, which he saw again in 1982 and in 1997. His most recent brush with nature was an 8.4-magnitude earthquake on the southern coast of Peru in 2001. Fortunately, unlike the 1970 disaster, this latest quake was not centered near many highly populated areas. As soon as the tremors faded, Moseley reunited with his graduate students and colleagues at a friend's house, where, safely above any ensuing tsunami, they enjoyed a few celebratory beers. But not everyone has been as lucky, he points out. In the 1990s, more people were driven from their homes by natural disasters than by war, with approximately 20 million “ecological refugees” in existence today. Past societies were perhaps equally vulnerable. Moseley studies the archaeological record of these civilizations, the ones roughed up by a combination of natural disasters, especially droughts, floods, and earthquakes. His work in this niche of geoarchaeology holds implications for today's world, too. “This is really the dark side of disaster. It's scary for modern folks to think about,” Moseley says. Elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2000, Moseley is now a distinguished professor of anthropology at the University of Florida (Gainesville, FL). His Inaugural Article (1), published in a previous issue of PNAS, describes his continuing work in traditional archaeology with Cerro Baul. The Cerro Baul colony, atop a 600-m mesa in southern Peru, was established by the Wari empire …