Modern use of an ancient farming system

Raised field construction (from Clark Erickson)

Raised fields -- an ancient form of agriculture, practiced by the Mayas, Aztecs, and the ancestors of the Incas -- was one of the most productive preindustrial farming systems anywhere. These fields were abandoned in most areas centuries ago, and largely forgotten. In the 1980s archaeologists excavated ancient raised  fields around Lake Titicaca in the Andes. Based on their findings, modern rural peoples started rebuilding raised fields. They turn out to be well adapted to the natural and social systems of the Titicaca area.

Archaeological interest in ancient raised fields starts with the observation that they were a form of
"intensive agriculture." Urban populations need large amounts of food, and with primitive transportation methods food had to be grown locally (unless we are talking about imperial Rome, where food could be shipped across the Mediterranean from Egypt easily and inexpensively). Under preindustrial conditions, "intensive agriculture" refers to methods that require considerable investment of labor in order to increase the yield on the land. Consider the difference between rainfall agriculture and irrigation agriculture in a given environment. The construction of canals and dams, and their required maintenence, can increase yields tremendously, but at the cost of requiring much more labor than rainfall agriculture. Irrigation is an example of intensive agriculture, while rainfall farming is a kind of extensive agriculture.

Figure 1 - Tiwanaku

Figure 2 - Relic fields on the shore of Lake Titicaca

Large, complex urban societies almost always rely on farming systems with intensive methods to feed their population. The most common forms of preindustrial intensive agriculture around the world were canal irrigation and hillside terracing. The earliest cities in Mesopotamia used irrigation, while the Inka cities of the Andes relied on terracing (with some irrigation). Aztec cities used both methods, plus the intensive cultivation of kitchen gardens. But perhaps the most remarkable form of ancient intensive agriculture were raised fields. This is a method of swamp reclamation, where long, parallel field beds are created by piling up dirt and muck from the swamp. Shallow canals are left in between the raised beds, and these canals have to be cleaned out periodically by scooping up the muck (a natural organic fertilizer) and piling it on the fields.

Fig. 3 - Clark Erickson

I talked about Aztec raised fields (called "chinampas") in a previous post. Here I want to focus on raised fields in the Andes. Tiwanaku was major urban center in Bolivia near Lake Titicaca, that flourished between AD 600 and 800 (fig 1). The plain around Lake Titicaca today is full of remnants of ancient raised fields (fig 2) that helped support the ancient city's population. A number of archaeologists have excavated and studied these ancient fields (see bibliography below). Here, I focus on the work of Clark Erickson (fig 3).

Fig 4

Clark Erickson (an old pal from graduate school at the University of Illinois) began with excavation and mapping of the fields, but then decided to see whether he could re-introduce the system for use by contemporary campesinos. In many ways ancient forms of intensive agriculture would seem to work well in the developing countries today -- they have high yields, use simple technology, they rely mainly on human labor, and they keep control of farming in local hands. This is a low-tech approach to economic development, using principles pioneered by EF Schumacher in his book, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (fig 4). It is the opposite of the high-tech approach that involves mechanized equipment, petrochemicals, and hybrid seeds. While many development agencies championed the latter approach, in fact it can be detrimental in poor rural areas. Once the foreign funding runs out, farmers can't buy or repair equipment, they can't afford the fertilizers and herbicides, and the result is that a few people get rich and most get poorer.

Fig 5 - Rebuilding ancient fields

Fig 6 - Ancient and rebuilt raised fields

Fig 7 - Building new fields

Clark managed to get some people to rebuilt and rehabilitate ancient raised fields (figs 5, 6), and others to build new fields from scratch (fig 7). He made use of a publicity campaign involving comic-book like pamphlets with text in both Spanish and Aymara (fig 8). At first the fields were a real success, and some farmers had yields higher than those who were following the high-tech development approach. Although his efforts were opposed by development experts from the United Nations and other development organizations, up to ten square km were planted in new raised fields in the 1980s.

By the 1990s, however, the results were mixed. Most of the farms that had been built communally, by large groups, had been abandoned. But the household-level farms, where individual families had built and farmed the new fields, were still functioning.

Fig 8 - Local publicity material

Clark Erickson has since moved on to pursue similar research in the swampy plains of eastern Bolivia, the Llanos de Mojos. He is just one of the archaeologists who have tried to re-introduce ancient farming systems to modern farmers. Alan Kolata has also worked on the Lake Titicaca raised fields, and Christian Isendahl is now working on ancient/modern connections with other indigenous farming systems in Bolivia. I tried doing something similar once in Mexico. An agronomist and I wanted to excavate Aztec terraces, study how they worked, and then try to get modern campesinos to rebuild the ancient terraces and use them again. We could not get funding for our project, however, and then we both ended up working on different topics.

The work of Clark Erickson and the other archaeologists mentioned above are great examples of how archaeological research on ancient cities is relevant to the concerns of the modern world. As we search for solutions to problems of hunger and poverty in the developing world, it behooves us to pay attention to ancient cities and cultures. Many of them were highly successful, and they have clues that can help us today.

• Check out Clark's homepage at the University of Pennsylvania. He has copies of these and other papers available to download:

Erickson, Clark L.
1989    Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin: Putting Ancient Agriculture Back to Work. Expedition 30 (3): 8-16.

1992    Applied Archaeology and Rural Development: Archaeology's Potential Contribution to the Future. Journal of the Steward Anthropological Society 20 (1-2): 1-16.

1992    Prehistoric Landscape Management in the Andean Highlands: Ridged Field Agriculture and Its Environmental Impact. Population and Environment 13: 285-300.

2003    Agricultural Landscapes as World Heritage: Raised Field Agriculture in Bolivia and Peru. In Managing Change: Sustainable Approaches to the Conservation of the Built Environment, edited by Jeanne-Marie Teutonica and Frank Matero, pp. 181-204. Getty Consserfation Institute, Los Angeles.

2006    Intensification, Political Economy, and the Farming Community: In Defense of a Bottom-Up Perspective on the Past. In Agricultural Strategies, edited by Joyce Marcus and Charles Stanish, pp. 334-363. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, Los Angeles.

Erickson, Clark L. and Kay L. Candler
1989    Raised Fields and Sustainable Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin of Peru. In Fragile Lands of Latin America: Strategies for Sustainable Development, edited by John O. Browder, pp. 230-248. Westview Press, Boulder.

• For other relevant research, see:

Janusek, John W. and Alan Kolata
2004    Top-Down or Bottom-Up: Rural Settlement and Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 23: 404-430.

Kolata, Alan L.
1986    The Agricultural Foundations of the Tiwanaku State: A View from the Hhinterland. American Antiquity 51: 748-763.

Kolata, Alan L., O. Rivera, J. C. Ramírez, and E. Gemio
1996    Rehabilitating Raised-Field Agriculture in the Southern Lake Titicaca Basin of Bolivia. In Tiwanaku and its Hinterland: Archaeology and Paleoecology of an Andean Civilization. Volume 1, Agroecology, edited by Alan L. Kolata, pp. 203-230. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Cities that are not "WEIRD"

Chicago: a WEIRD city

Much of what psychologists know about human behavior comes from experiments on college campuses. Any anthropologist will tell you that this is a very biased sample of members of the human species. Yet psychologists went along making grand generalizations about human behavior and thought on the basis of their narrow sample of U.S. undergraduates. Two years ago, anthropologist Joseph Heinrich and two colleagues published a critique of this practice (Henrich et al 2010a). They also published a brief opinion piece in the journal Nature (Henrich et al. 2010b). They note that:

"People from Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) societies--and particularly American undergraduates--are some of the most psychologically unusual people on Earth" (Henrich et al 2010b: 29)

The overall thrust of their critique is that psychologists should take a wider perspective and carry out their experiments and other research on diverse peoples and cultures around the world. See also a nice post about their research by Greg Downey in the excellent blog, Neuroanthropology.

Henrich, Joseph, Stephen J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan

2010a    The Weirdest People in the World? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33:61-135.

Henrich, Jospeh, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan

2010b    Most People are not WEIRD. Nature 466:29.

So what about cities? Can one make broad generalizations about cities and urbanism after looking only a WEIRD cities? That is, cities in Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic societies. This  is just what many scholars tried to do in the twentieth century. Sociologist Louis Wirth, for example, published many WEIRD generalizations about cities and urban life (based mainly on Chicago) that anthropologists who worked in other countries spent decades disproving. See my earlier posts on defining cities and on spatial and social order for discussions of Wirth.

This blog is dedicated to expanding our perspectives on cities. If we want to know about urbanism, we need to look at cities across time and throughout the world. It is fine to study and pay attention to WEIRD cities like Chicago. Don't get me wrong - I've lived in Chicago, and it is a fantastic city. It has great neighborhoods, pink flamingos, and the best scholarly book about an American City. But it is a Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic city, a WEIRD city, and not all cities are like it.

Chicago is certainly part of the Wide Urban World, but so is Jakarta, Teotihuacan, Uruk, Cahokia, Chang'an, and hundreds of other cities around the world and throughout history. Now that my sabbatical is over and my lab and office have been moved to another building, its time to get back to blogging about the Wide Urban World.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

   People sometimes think that ancient cities and sites must always have some kind of sacred symbolism. One idea is that the entire material world was sacred in ancient times, but we have since lost the symbolism sometime and now live in a degraded, secular world today. Personally, I don't think ancient people were any more obsessed with sacred symbolism than people are today. But this notion that ancient people were wild with symbolism is common today. In  my opinion, however, "sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" (it turns out that this statement, often attributed to Sigmund Freud, cannot be verified. But it is still a great phrase that applies to ancient symbolism).

Hope pottery design

I am going to discuss two examples of this attitude as applied to the layout of cities and buildings. But first, a few words about pictorial decoration as symbolism in general. Maybe you think you can identify ancient sacred symbols just by looking at them. Well, consider ethnographer

Hopi pot

Ruth Bunzel's (1929) study of Southwestern pueblo pottery.  Here is what she said about Hopi designs:

"Among the Hopi,  there are no 'stories,' that is, no complex situations influencing the affairs of man. Nor is any magical potency ever imputed, even secondarily, to designs. Designs, when they have any significance at all, are pictures of material objects ." Bunzel (1929: 70).

Acoma pot

Yet many people have looked at the nice Hopi designs and assumed that they must be sacred symbols. Bunzel found the same thing for the potters of Acoma: 

" At Acoma there is no trace whatever of symbolism in design. Even my most communicative informant could give no meaning of any kind. She said, 'We have only three names for designs: Red, black and striped. The designs to not mean anything'." (Bunzel, p. 71).

Burley's plan for Canberra

Theosophist symbols

Now I turn to city symbolism. In his book, The Secret Plan of Canberra, author Peter Proudfoot argues that planner Walter Burley Griffin, who laid out the Australian capital Canberra around 1910, incorporated secret Theosophist symbols into the design.Theosophy was a system of esoteric philosophy popular in the nineteenth century. I don't find Proudfoot's argument at all convincing, and the book reveals far more about his own ideas than about the plan of Canberra.

Theosophist symbols

El Escorial

Taylor's interpretation of El Escorial

Taylor's interpretation of El Escorial

My second example is the palace of El Escorial, built for Philip II in the 16th century outside of Madrid. René Taylor (1967) argues that Philip's architect was into esoteric philosophical symbolism and designed the building to express these symbols. He could not let anyone know he was doing this, however (including Philip), since his beliefs were against the teaching of the church, and the Spanish Inquisition was in full swing. (But NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition). George Kubler (1981:128-130) has an easy time critiquing Taylor's rather screwy interpretations. Again, like Proudfoot's account of Canberra, Taylor's odd theory reveals more about his own thinking than about the plans of El Escorial or the thoughts of its designer.

El Escorial today

 I had the good fortune to spend some time around El Escorial at a "Curso de Verano" on the Aztecs a number of years ago. Hosted by my friend and colleague José Luis de Rojas, this was a very nice week-long course with several Aztec specialists and an excellent audience of students and others. José's new book on the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan will be released shortly; it is an excellent book.

Anyway, back to Sigmund Freud and Groucho Marx (I'd like to include some Groucho Marx quotes about cigars, but I can't because this blog is family-rated). In a couple of journal articles I have criticized the notion that ancient Maya cities were sacred symbols (Smith 2003, 2005). I am not sure why many people today—both scholars and others—have the idea that ancient peoples were obsessed with death, with myths, and with sacred symbolism. There is a nice You-Tube video on the myth that the ancient Egyptians were obsessed with death. But if one takes a skeptical and empirical (that is, scientific) perspective, there is remarkably little hard evidence for an ancient preoccupation with sacred symbolism. This notion seems to fit our modern biases and preconceptions about ancient people, so it gets tossed around in the absence of evidence. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar.

Bunzel, Ruth
1929    The Pueblo Potter: A Study of Creative Imagination in Primitive Art. Columbia University Press, New York.

Kubler, George
    1981    Building the Escorial. Princeton University Press, Princeton.

Proudfoot, Peter R.
1994    The Secret Plan of Canberra. University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, NSW, Australia.

Taylor, René
1967    Architecture and Magic: Consideration on the Idea of the Escorial. In Essays in the History of Architecture Presented to Rudolf Wittkower, edited by Douglas Fraser, Howard Hibbard, and Milton J. Levine, pp. 81-109. Phaidon Press, London.

Smith, Michael E.
2003    Can We Read Cosmology in Ancient Maya City Plans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff. Latin American Antiquity 14:221-228.



Smith, Michael E.2005    Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms? Latin American Antiquity 16:217-224.