Lost Tribes Used Clever Tricks to Turn Amazon Wasteland to Farms

[n2doc]

By Brandon Keim April 12, 2010 | 3:00 pm | Categories: Agriculture, Anthropology


A vast series of earth mounds on the eastern coast of South America may be living landscape fossils of a forgotten civilization’s agriculture.

People raised the mounds between 1,000 and 700 years ago in order to create cropland in terrain that is flooded for half the year, and parched for the other half. New insect ecosystems formed on the mounds, further enriching the soils and keeping them fertile for centuries, long after their human stewards had vanished. This lost agricultural system could be a model for modern farmers, according to a new study.

“Today these lands are used for cattle ranching or hunting. People think agriculture must not be possible in these areas,” said ecologist Doyle McKey of the University of Montpellier in France, co-author of a study published April 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The common conception is that these areas are wastelands.”


McKey and a team of archaeologists, paleobiologists and soil scientists describe the earthworks, which run for 360 miles from the Berbice River to Cayenne, the modern-day capital of Guyana.



Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/lost-amazon-farms/

[DCKit]

1. And these are the people who never invented and used the wheel.

Yet we may never know the full extent of their knowledge.

[tabatha]

2. Yep, they were deemed savages.

But, I am sure they savaged the land a whole heap less than us.

[Igel]

3. They really weren't deemed anything.

Mostly their existence was ignored.

The article says they vanished shortly before Europeans arrived. I don't think that rules out the possibility that European infection diseases so reduced the population that the entire culture was undermined and collapsed. Depends exactly on what "shortly" means and what the margin of error is, and whether "Europeans arrived" means to S. America/Caribbean or to that specific area.

[tabatha]

7. To ignore an existence

is to be aware of it to ignore it. And the very word savage, defines who they were considered to be ---- to earlier Europeans - whether they were ignored, not ignored or anything else. Their status was not defined by what other people did to them. They lived in the "wild". Period.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/savage

And you missed the point - that the so defined "savages" (people living in the "wild") were actually not, but we who have "savaged" the land, in actual fact are.

[Recursion]

6. Jared Diamond writes about that

It wasn't that they "didn't invent the wheel"; they had kids toys with wheels on them. Large wheels just wouldn't have been very useful to them given the terrain.

[era veteran]

4. Charles Mann's book 1491 has great insights about the natives terra-forming

in North and South America, a good read. Here is a wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Second that book rec. nt