Pre-Columbian Fish Farm

Pre-Columbian Fish Farm

By Will Parker on November 12, 2000 in News

Since the late 1950s, scientists have known about the existence of grand-scale earthworks throughout Bolivia’s Amazonian region of Baures. Recent investigations by archaeologists indicate that some of these earthworks are the remains of a unique, highly productive landscape-scale fishery operated by pre-Columbian native peoples at least 300 years ago. The discovery, made by Dr. Clark Erickson, associate curator of the American section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, sheds new light on the region’s pre-Columbian Native Americans — peoples with the engineering and environmental know-how to transform a marginal Amazonian environment to a landscape capable of serving a far larger human population than lives in the area today.

Working with a joint U.S./Bolivian research team since 1995, Dr. Erickson has documented a complex artificial network of hydraulic earthworks covering 326 square miles on the flat, seasonally flooded savanna landscape of the Baures region of Bolivia, bordering Brazil. Throughout the landscape there are dense networks of interconnected, linear zigzag structures of raised earth. Dr. Erickson has identified the zigzag structures as permanent fish weirs, or traps, which are designed to take advantage of the seasonal flooding, when fish migrate to and spawn in the inundated savannas. The fish weirs and accompanying artificial built ponds, he contends, together provided a form of intensive aquaculture, allowing easy management and harvest of high protein food — in quantities sufficient to sustain large populations in the otherwise formidable savanna environment.

About three to six feet wide and 7 to 20 inches tall, the fish weirs change direction every 30 to 100 feet. Funnel-like openings three to six feet long and wide are present where the structures form sharp angles, and small circular ponds about 90 feet in diameter are nearby.

The savannas of Baures are inundated with a thin sheet of water during the rainy season. Dr. Erickson determined that the early inhabitants of the region built the low, narrow earthworks to control and enhance the movement of fish across this landscape. Small parallel openings where the weirs change direction were used to channel fish into traps. The associated ponds were used for the concentration and live storage of fish during the dry season.

More:
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20001008173027data_trunc_sys.shtml

Anthropology:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12292828