CONCLUSION

Slash-and-burn agricultural technology can be used only for a few years and thereafter it is necessary to clear a new plot. Relatively small groups employ this shifting pattern. When population numbers rise, new solutions must be found. In the low floodplains, raised fields seem to be the best answer. For example, in northern Amapa, when the Palikur became too numerous in the seventeenth century, they adopted a raised field agricultural technique.

Raised field agriculture predominates on the western French Guiana coast between ca. AD 1000 and 1400. Demographic estimates suggest that a village of 500-1000 inhabitants could cultivate the 90 ha of the Piliwa ridged fields in the Lower Mana. Population density could have reached 50-100 persons/km2 in areas with raised fields.

Raised fields served to cultivate crops in swamps with good water control and improved soil conditions through aeration of the soil, the mixing of soil horizons, and the augmentation of the organic matter-rich topsoil. Pollen analysis, early historical records and artifacts used for the processing of plants, found in the former villages, suggest that manioc and maize predominated on the raised fields.

The raised fields technique was the best answer to the problem of cultivation in the coastal floodplain of French Guiana. This suggests a remarkable management of the environment by the Indians. During pre-Columbian times, human impact on the forest was considerable. The French Guiana forest had been partially subjected to clearing by slash-and-burn during these last 2,000 years (Tardy 1998) and in Amazonia at least 11.8 % of the rainforest was modified by human activities (Balee 1989). Even though the estimates vary in the different landscapes, it is obvious that most of the coastal landscape of French Guiana was modified by pre-Columbian earthworks. Raised fields are evidence that the Indians were not dependent on their environment but, rather, they dominated and “humanized” their landscape.

Acknowledgments to Claude Musynski Delpuech for typesetting the figures, and to Georges Clement for drawing Figure 13.9. At the beginning of this work I was helped greatly by Jean Hurault, a specialist in stereoscopic analysis at the French Institut Geographique National, and an authority on the Indian history of French Guiana. He died in September 2005, and this chapter is dedicated to him.