Researcher examines Atacama Desert farm fields abandoned 500 years ago
March 26, 2015
Researcher examines Atacama Desert farm fields abandoned 500 years ago
22 hours ago by Karen Wentworth
High in the Atacama Desert, around 10,000 feet, anyone with a computer and Google Earth can look at the fields around Turi, Chile and see small neatly laid out fields, terraced and lined with rocks. No crops are growing there now, but it looks as though the farmers laid down their stone hoes and just walked away.
University of New Mexico Associate Professor of Anthropology Frances Hayashida says that is more or less what they did more than 500 years ago. The climate is so dry the fields and the elaborate irrigation systems are almost perfectly preserved.
"These are systems that were developed about 1,000 A.D. when people figured out how to divert water from springs which are recharged by snowmelt from the Andes," says Hayashida. There wasn't much water even then. Anthropologists haven't yet tried to calculate exactly how much farmers had to work with, but farming was always marginal here.
It was conquest, first by the Incas, then by the Spanish that changed lifestyles of the indigenous people and made copper mining into a local industry. The Incas conquered this land in the early 1400's.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-03-atacama-farm-fields-abandoned-years.html#jCp
Anthropology:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/12291991
