Proceedings of the 12th International INQUA meeting on paleoseismology, active tectonic and archaeoseismology

Plate beneath the South American Plate (e.g., Chlieh et al., 2011), and (2) shallow events along seismogenic crustal faults on the overriding plate (e.g., Benavente et al., 2017; Gaidzik & Więsek, 2021; Gaidzik et al., 2022; Woszczycka et al., 2024) and related landslide hazard (e.g., Gaidzik et al., 2020). However, it also reveals a mosaic of towns and villages with histories spanning pre-Inca times, Inca rule, and the 16th-century Spanish conquest. Among these, four settlements in the upper Colca Valley – Malata, Laiqa Laiqa, Mawchu Llacta (Santa Cruz de Tuti), and Tuti – show a pattern of occupation and abandonment spanning ~300 years. While the directions and timelines of these movements are studied, the reasons behind these migrations remain unclear. Political factors, often attributed to resettlements during the Spanish conquest, may not uniformly explain cases like Laiqa Laiqa, abandoned just within two decades after founding, and Mawchu Llacta, deserted in the 19th century because of "bad conditions" (Wernke, 2017; Ramos Yucra, 2018). The question persists: What drove the abandonment and establishment of these sites? To address these issues, we employed archaeoseismological methods to examine settlements – Malata, Laiqa Laiqa, Mawchu Llacta, and Tuti – focusing on their churches and ruins. Our goal was to determine if natural disasters influenced the relocations between the 16th and 19th centuries in the upper Colca Valley, Peru. Our study reveals damages and irregularities in these sites, linking them to potential causal factors. Archaeoseismological findings suggest that certain settlements were abandoned not