Local farmers have constructed more than 9400 ha of raised fields for agricultural production in Baiyangdian Lake, the largest lake in the North China Plain.
The men of a household wove cloth, herded sheep, and raised field and dune crops of corn (maize), squash, beans, and cotton.
"Rather than domesticate the species they exploited," says Erickson, "the people of Baure domesticated the landscape". Erickson's savannah is contoured by a dense, interconnecting network of earthen causeways, settlement mounds, raised fields, and thousands of kilo metres of ridges, up to two metres across and half-a-metre high, that zig-zag across the landscape.
Combined engineering activities of these organisms in the soil of ancient raised fields led to the accumulation of stable macroaggregates and pores, which should reduce the redistribution of fine soil particles between mounds and inter-mounds caused by erosion.
In other challenging environments such as the seasonally flooded grasslands of Bolivia's Llanos de Mojos, around Lake Titicaca and in the great river basins of lowland Colombia and Ecuador, the creation of complex patterns of raised fields and canals fostered a favourable micro-climate that would have earned these early farmers miraculous harvests.
The objective of this research was to obtain experimental information on a number of processes that affect the agricultural production of the raised fields system, such as the cultivation of Phragmites australis.
Three different types of raised fields co-existing in the same site near the community of Exaltación, in north-western Beni, were studied.
We describe all types of raised fields known in the LM, and introduce one new type, the filón.
We provide the most detailed description and mapping to date of raised fields and their distribution across the Bolivian Amazon.
We explore the complexity of coupled human environment interactions and propose hypotheses to explain the variation observed in the design of raised fields.
