With National Science Foundation support Dr. Clark Erickson will study prehistoric agricultural systems of the Llanos de Mojos of northeastern Bolivia. This region, part of the vast upper Amazon drainage basin, is one of the largest areas of seasonally inundated grassland savanna in the world, covering some 145,000 square kilometers. During the rainy season of 4-6 months the area is inundated and the alteration of marked wet and dry seasons and the waterlogged and heavy soils have a significant impact on contemporary land use patterns. Past indigenous populations developed a complex system of massive earthworks to solve the problems of water control and agriculture. Dr. Erickson will attempt to reconstruct how this worked. To accomplish this he will conduct a number of activities. Aerial photographs and ground survey will be employed to locate the most extensive and best preserved raised field complexes and canal-causeway networks. Accurate topographic maps will also be made. With this as a basis key agricultural structures will be excavated. Long stratigraphic trenches will be dug perpendicular to raised fields causeways and canals to determine their original profiles, individual building stages, post-depositional erosional history, and chronology of use and abandonment. In situ materials will serve both to date and determine how fields were constructed and used. This research is important for several reasons. It will shed new light on the prehistory of a little known area of the world and produce data of interest to many archaeologists. It will also help to devise subsistence strategies which will be of direct use in many regions. In some tropical areas prehistoric population exceeded its modern counterpart. This most likely is due to the use of appropriate technologies which have since been lost. Dr. Erickson will help to recover them.
