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Popular Archeology

Discovery of a unique drainage and irrigation system that gave way to the “Neolithic Revolution” in the Amazon (29 notícias)

Publicado em 29 de janeiro de 2025

Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona —A pre-Columbian society in the Amazon developed a sophisticated agricultural engineering system that allowed them to produce maize throughout the year, according to a recent discovery by a team of researchers from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, (Spain); the Universities of Exeter, Nottingham, Oxford, Reading and Southampton (UK); the University of São Paulo (Brazil) and Bolivian collaborators. This finding contradicts previous theories that dismissed the possibility of intensive monoculture agriculture in the region.

The study*, published today in the journal Nature, describes how the pre-Hispanic Casarabe society of the Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia designed and implemented an innovative landscape engineering system, including the construction of extensive drainage canals and farm ponds. This advancement allowed the transformation of flooded tropical savannahs into highly productive fields, thereby driving the development of the “Neolithic Revolution” in the Amazon, understood as the process towards an economy based on grain production.

This region, inhabited by the Casarabe people between 500 and 1400 A.D., is a tropical lowland savannah marked by intense rainy seasons and flooding, as well as very dry seasons. The discovery, led by Umberto Lombardo, an environmental archaeologist at the UAB, has identified a unique agricultural infrastructure previously undocumented anywhere else in the world.. This system enabled them to drain excess water from flooded fields during the rainy season, facilitating agricultural productivity. In addition to the drainage canals, the Casarabe people constructed clusters of farm ponds that served as water reservoirs. These ponds enabled pot-irrigation, allowing maize cultivation to continue throughout the dry season.