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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)
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