Living Systems of Raised-Field Agriculture in Africa: What Can They Tell Us About Pre-Columbian Systems in the Neotropics?

Summary

The study of pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture is marked by several unresolved questions: How did raised fields function as agroecosystems? Were they cultivated continuously or were fallow periods incorporated? What population densities did they support? Did making and managing raised-field landscapes require top-down control in a hierarchical society (or supervision by specialists)? Can raised-field agriculture play any role in reconciling food production and ecosystem services in wetlands today? Attempts to answer these questions have drawn on three main kinds of data: geoarchaeological data; information on rare surviving systems such as the chinampas, probably atypical; and information from experiments in rehabilitated raised fields. Living African systems provide new kinds of data. Forty years ago Denevan and Turner drew attention to extant raised-field agricultural systems in the Old World tropics. However, there has been no sustained attempt to use these living systems as mirrors on the past. We present data from ongoing studies of extant raised-field agriculture in seasonal wetlands of the Bangweulu Basin in Zambia and the cuvette of the Congo. These studies are providing information pertinent to unresolved questions surrounding pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture in the neotropics and the agronomic potential of this technique in the past, now and in the future.

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Cite this Record

Living Systems of Raised-Field Agriculture in Africa: What Can They Tell Us About Pre-Columbian Systems in the Neotropics?. Doyle McKey, Mélisse Durécu, Marion Comptour, Christine Raimond, Axelle Solibiéda. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396171)

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Spatial Coverage

min long: -18.809; min lat: -38.823 ; max long: 53.262; max lat: 38.823 ;