Author: John Noble Wilford
Publication: The Asian
Age
Date: November 16, 2000
While other archaeologists
spend their careers looking for "lost" cities, Dr Clark Erickson of the
University of Pennsylvania Museum keeps a practiced eye out for "lost"
landscapes.
His explorations in the
Amazon basin of Bolivia have uncovered distinct traces of major earth-moving
modifications to the landscape made by pre-European cultures. These
ancient landscape engineers transformed unpromising savannas and, wetlands
into prime agricultural land by draining here and piling dirt there, creating
settlement mounds and raised fields for crops, long causeways and canals.
The discovery of this
handiwork helped explain how this region, with its poor soil and extremes
of wet and dry seasons, was once capable of sustaining a far larger human
population than lives there today. The evidence for such landscape
engineering in the past is also forcing scholars to reassess long-held
assumptions that the tropical lowlands could not support populous civilisations.
Now Erickson has found
new evidence of a "lost" landscape of ponds and zigzagging channels covering
more than 300 square miles of seasonally flooded savanna in Bolivia's Baures
region, which borders Brazil and is washed by tributaries of the Amazon
River. At each change of direction, the channels have small funnel-like
openings that Erickson thinks were used as weirs, or traps for harvesting
fish.
(New York Times News
Service)