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| Contemporary Baure dugout canoes on the upper Amazon in Bolivia. (Click any image to enlarge.) Source. |
The Baure people live between the San Martin, San Joaquin, and Negro Rivers -- upper reaches of the Amazon River system -- in northern Bolivia, near Brazil. The region is mostly savanna, cut
through by navigable rivers and streams and with many wetlands and
lakes. During the 3-5 month rainy season, the flat savanna and pampas grassland is completely covered
by water. As the rainy season ends and the water recedes, the land gradually
dries out to support agriculture and grazing.
The Baure people now number less than10,000, but when first described by Jesuit missionaries in the sixteenth
century, they were more numerous, living in hundreds of towns on slightly elevated
sections of land that naturally support patches of forest dotting the otherwise flat landscape.
According to archaeologist Clark L. Erickson, each town was ruled by a hereditary chief,
and the towns “had large public plazas with a large men's house or temple in
the center. Around the plaza were hundreds of houses arranged along streets and
wide avenues. Deep defensive moats and tall palisade walls surrounded many
settlements.” Between the towns, raised agricultural fields were
built up above the floor of the savanna. Altogether, the area was a
"densely populated region filled with large, well- organized dispersed
settlements."
Between about 2,000 BP and the time of European contact, the
Baure built thousands of raised roads between their towns, totalling tens of
thousands of linear miles. Radiating like spokes from every town, these roads
connected the towns to one another and to surrounding raised-field farms. They
were perfectly straight, often 3 (and occasionally as much as 7) miles long, and no more than a meter high – just high enough to raise the road
surface above the seasonal floodwaters. Usually 12-15 feet wide, they were
occasionally as wide as 60 feet. They were of simple packed earth construction,
the material for which was excavated immediately adjacent to the road itself on
one or both sides, creating a network of canals alongside each road.
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| Roads carrying foot traffic and canals floating dugout canoes worked in parallel in precolumbian Baure culture. Source. |
The road-canal system served multiple functions. The roads
were, of course, used for communication and trade. Road travel may also have had important ceremonial or social significance, and the roads may have served as
property or territorial boundaries. The roads also likely functioned as dikes to
keep certain areas dry and/or to maintain stocks of water in others (for fish
empoundments, example), and the canals would have been used to control the flow
of water for these functions.
The roads themselves were often built in parallel to and relatively
close to one another, so that as many as four roads might connect two towns.
This was probably redundant for transportation needs, but it makes sense for
the purposes of water control, demarcation of land rights, and possibly
ceremonial purposes. Lacking any monumental architecture, the Baure may have
viewed their roads – the result of large-scale communal effort – as the
equivalent of individual municipal monuments, and the vast road-and-canal
network might have served that purpose on a culture-wide basis.
Dugout canoes are in use to this day in the Baures region,
and it is almost certain that they were used on the canals for transportation
in the precolumbian era. Dugouts made possible the movement of larger
quantities of agricultural produce and trade goods than could have been efficiently
carried by manpower on the roads. (The Baure had no draft animals or wheeled
vehicles.) The canals would have retained enough water for canoe travel long
after the savannas dried out at the end of the rainy season, and many of them
connected to navigable rivers, expanding the transportation network even
further and linking the Baure to distant areas in the Amazon system.
Sources:
Pre-Columbian Roads of the Amazon, Clark L. Erickson, from the publication Expedition, published by Penn Museum (date unknown)
Prehispanic Earthworks of the Baures Region of the Bolivian Amazon,
Arqueologist Wilma
Winkler Verlarde and Dr.
Clark L. Erickson, a project of the Instituto Nacional de Arqueologia de Bolivia and the University of Pennsylvania Museum
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