Moxos level
The Moxos plain (Spanish: Llanos de Moxos , sometimes also spelled "Mojos") is an approximately 110,000 km² flood savannah in the northern lowlands of Bolivia in the Beni department . Their name goes back to the indigenous Moxo group who settled there in the 17th century.
The plain is not an ideal settlement area as the soils are poor in nutrients and large areas of the Moxos plain are under water for months during the rainy season.
Excavations
The archaeological excavations in Beni were started in 1908 by the Swede Erland Nordenskiöld on three hills southeast of the regional capital Trinidad . a. Ceramics. The results so far show that there was already lively settlement activity in the Moxos plain in the pre-Columbian period between 500 and 1400 AD, so it ended before the arrival of the Spaniards.
In the 1960s, William Denevan from the University of Wisconsin flew over the area and marveled at the canals, hills and earthworks that revolutionized scientific understanding. Due to political instability and drug cultivation, which leads to distrust of whites, this only led to a small increase in excavations.
The American geologist Kenneth Lee tried from the 1970s to determine whether and how a culture could operate intensive agriculture on the nutrient-poor soils. He suspected that the "mound beds" on the Rio Iruyañez near Santa Ana del Yacuma were used to grow thick-stemmed water hyacinths , an extreme weed that could be used as fertilizer, but this theory has been disproved since the 1990s. From the 1990s, long-term excavations were carried out under Clark Erickson from the University of Pennsylvania and William Balée, the results have largely not yet been published. The Brazilian archaeologist Denise Schaan from the University of Pala in Belem and her Finnish colleague Martti Pärssinen have so far discovered over 200 round, square and triangular trench structures using Google Earth . The extent to which one can speak of "high culture" like that of the Andean peoples is still very controversial, but the lowlands were certainly not just hunters and gatherers, as had long been assumed.
Heiko Prümers from the German Archaeological Institute (DAI) is particularly active on two excavation mounds ("Lomas") in the southeast of the Beni district near the village of Casarabe:
- Loma Mendoza: 50 kilometers east of Trinidad
- Loma Salvatierra: Prümers discovered a "prince's" grave here, the sub-caciques of Casarabe , and many bone artifacts with a wide range of functions (tools and implements, jewelry, musical instruments)
The cultivation of cassava and pumpkins was already practiced over 10,000 years ago.
Web links
- Archaeological project Moxos, Bolivia German Archaeological Institute, around 2010
- Heiko Prümers: Hills surrounded by "beautiful monsters". Excavations in the Loma Mendoza Expeditions in Forgotten Worlds. 25 years of archaeological research in America, Africa and Asia. 2004 (PDF; 2.29 MB)
- The Lowland Barbarians Picture of Science, November 1, 1999
- Beyond El Dorado Tagesspiegel, April 8, 2010
- Charles C. Mann: Earthmovers of the Amazon and Charles C. Mann: The Good Earth: Did People Improve The Amazon Basin? Science, February 4, 2000 ( English )
- Bolivia protects the largest wetland in New Germany, March 25, 2013
Individual evidence
- ↑ Description
- ↑ Umberto Lombardo, José Iriarte, Lautaro Hilbert, Javier Ruiz-Pérez, José M. Capriles, Heinz Veit: Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia. In: Nature. 2020, doi : 10.1038 / s41586-020-2162-7 .
- ↑ Agriculture began in the Amazon 10,000 years ago. University of Bern , April 8, 2020, accessed on April 8, 2020 .