Mojos drew the attention of European explorers in the sixteenth century as they sought opportunities to extract riches from indigenous states very quickly. El Dorado, Paititi and Gran Mojos were all names for a mythical kingdom of gold, or for its leader. Early historical documents describing the area were written in the course of these explorations, and later as part of Jesuit missionary work in Mojos. These documents described large villages and powerful chiefs; one missionary claimed in a matter-of-fact way to have met this king himself.
The image of El Dorado has recently been the rhetorical focus of a discussion of social and political organization in Amazonia (Meggers 2004; Stahl 2002; Heckenberger et al. 1999). In Mojos, this discussion considers two lines of evidence, historical and archaeological. Denevan (1966, 2001) and Block (1994) summarize the early historical sources. The documents describe groups of people living in large villages (larger than 200 people, and in many cases larger than 500 people); alliances between large villages; and political leaders with considerable power, including the power to kill offenders. These sources originally led Julian Steward, in the Handbook of South American Indians, to classify the societies of Mojos with “Circum-Caribbean” societies, in contrast to simpler “Tropical Forest” societies that characterized most of Amazonia (see Chapter 1 in this volume).
Historical documents must be carefully interpreted, but this does not mean that early descriptions of Mojeno peoples should be discarded. Jesuit accounts in particular, in their comprehensiveness and detail, provide relevant information for the seventeenth century. These documents (which have been analyzed only in part) indicate that a variety of societies were present in Mojos at the time of contact. They describe hunters, accomplished farmers (but say little about earthworks), weavers, potters, feather workers, fishermen and gatherers. They contrast Indians who wore clothes and were “gentle,” with “wild,” naked cannibals. The ethnohistoric record suggests that Mojos was a multilingual and perhaps multiethnic region, with many different forms of social and political organization present at the same time.
The outlines of this argument changed in the late 1950s, when a number of different researchers independently recorded the existence of earthworks on a regional scale. Denevan showed that pre-Columbian people had produced many artificial landscapes across Mojos, of many types, and over a great area. This placed Mojos, as an example of raised field agriculture, alongside many important locations around the Americas, including the Andean altiplano, Colombia, Venezuela, the Guianas, West Mexico, the Valley of Mexico, the Maya region, and the upper Midwestern United States (see Chapters 11, 12, 13, 16, 17, 23 in this volume). Mojos is an example of the intensive use of the landscape by indigenous Amazonians, implying greater social and political complexity than generally admitted for pre-Columbian Amazonia. The anthropogenic landscape allows this organization to be studied on three scales: the regional scale of broad divisions in the archaeological record, the local scale of the creation and maintenance of the agricultural landscape, and the intermediate scale of large political units.
At the regional scale (across tens to hundreds of kilometers), differences between the four landscape types correspond to differences in how much labor was required to reshape
The terrain, and how much coordination would be required to use and maintain it. For example, the amount of earth moved per unit area can serve as a proxy for labor mobilization. In rough terms, the average figure is highest for the west, followed by the east, then the north and finally the south. The coordination of different types of earthworks and water control also would have been the most complex in the west and east, and much less so in the north and south. Differences in labor costs vary within each area, but the general trends suggest that there were significant differences in the organizational solutions devised by farmers. This in turn suggests diversity in the social and political organization of Mojos raised field farmers.
At the local scale (across tens to hundreds of meters), there is similar evidence for diversity among farmers. In the northern region, the spatial patterns of large raised fields were analyzed in conjunction with estimates of raised field construction costs and production. This suggests that groups of between 30 and 100 people might have been responsible for the construction of many large fields, in discrete spatial groups. These groups of people are likely to correspond to a local social unit (Walker 2000, 2004). A similar analysis is underway in western Mojos, along the Apere River, where there are spatially discrete areas of raised fields that may correspond to local social units (Erickson and Walker ms.). The complexity of the built environment creates many opportunities for analysis and for the study of spatial pattern. Scholars of many different theoretical perspectives agree that landscapes contain information about the social and political organization of the peoples who produce it. These minimal units within Mojos landscapes are indicators of the smallest units of social and political organization.
Finally, attention should be focused on the intermediate scale between the local and the regional, because this is where the evidence of what is usually called social and political organization will be found. If the predecessors of the “chiefdoms” described in the ethno-historic literature were associated with raised field construction and maintenance, then it will be possible to discern outlines of large units within the spatial patterns of earthworks. Connections between political organization and agricultural organization are to be investigated and not assumed. In one case where settlement evidence is associated with raised field patterning, it appears that large settlements were associated with a comparatively simple agricultural landscape (Walker 2004).
World History
