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Social Implications from Agricultural Taskscapes in the Southwestern Amazon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

John H. Walker
John H. Walker*
Affiliation:
University of Central Florida, Department of Anthropology, 4000 Central Florida Boulevard, Howard Phillips Hall 309, Orlando, FL 32816-1361 ([email protected] )
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Abstract

Across the Americas, but particularly in the Amazon Basin, precolumbian farmers invested their labor in features such as canals, causeways, and raised fields, creating agricultural landscapes. These landscapes required organized action in order to build and maintain them. Such actions can be usefully described as "tasks" to draw specific connections between communal work and landscape features (Ingold 1993). Using two parallel examples from the precolumbian Bolivian Amazon, this article presents landscape features as correlates of the variety and scale of tasks that compose the processes of creating and managing them. Data come from remote sensing and pedestrian survey. The execution of some tasks affects the execution of others, meaning that landscapes are the result of overlapping, interdependent communal tasks. This taskscape perspective allows landscapes to be compared with greater precision and shows that details of local spatial and task organization are important to understanding agricultural change. The comparison of two taskscapes reveals details of daily life and intensive agriculture that are obscured by the classification of societies as states or chiefdoms.

Resumen

Resumen

A través de las Américas, pero particularmente en la cuenca Amazónica, los agricultores precolombinos invirtieron su trabajo en rasgos como canales, terraplenes y campos elevados, creando paisajes agrícolas. Estos paisajes requirieron de acciones organizadas para su construcción y mantenimiento. Estas acciones pueden ser descritas útilmente como "tareas" para rastrear conexiones especificas entre tareas comunales y rasgos del paisaje (Ingold 1993). Usando dos ejemplos paralelos de la Amazonia Boliviana precolombina, este artículo presenta rasgos del paisaje como indicadores de la variedad y escala de las tareas que comprenden los procesos de crearlos y manejarlos. Los datos relacionados al paisaje provienen de la teledetección y de un trabajo de reconocimiento pedestre. La ejecución de algunas tareas afecta la realización de otras, lo que significa que los paisajes son el resultado de tareas comunales interdependientes que se sobreponen. Esta perspectiva de las tareas para producir paisajes (taskscape) permite comparar los paisajes con más precisión y muestra que los detalles de la organización local, espacial y de las tareas son esenciales para entender el cambio agrícola. La comparación de dos "taskscapes" revela detalles de la vida cotidiana y de la agricultura intensiva que son oscurecidos por la clasificación de las sociedades como estados o cacicazgos.

Type
Articles
Information
Latin American Antiquity , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 275 - 295
Copyright
Copyright ©2011 by the Society for American Archaeology.

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