Fieldwork in a little-studied corner of the Bolivian Amazon has revealed that Indigenous communities shaped and sustained complex, productive wetland landscapes for more than a millennium, a new study says.
Researchers who explored the Great Tectonic Lakes of Exaltación in the Beni department documented monumental earthworks, raised fields, and intricate canal systems beneath grasslands and shallow waters around Lakes Rogaguado and Ginebra. The evidence, detailed in a paper published this year in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, shows repeated human occupation and landscape engineering from about 600 to 1,400 CE.
“The lakes and surrounding plains are a living archive of long-term human adaptation,” said the report’s authors, who used survey, excavation, and LiDAR mapping to reveal sites that had been largely invisible beneath modern vegetation and seasonal floodwaters.
Indigenous peoples thrived
The September 2021 expedition, organized by the Grupo de Trabajo para los Llanos de Moxos, brought together scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the U.S. National Museum of Natural History, Bolivia’s Institute of Ecology, and other institutions, as well as the University of Bonn’s Department of Anthropology of the Americas.
Radiocarbon dates from four sites, Paquío, Coquinal, Isla del Tesoro, and Jasschaja, indicate successive occupations. Paquío shows an early phase around AD 600 and a more intensive occupation between about AD 1000 and AD 1200 marked by shell middens, dense ceramic deposits, and an elaborate network of canals and raised fields tied to maize-based agriculture. Jasschaja, dated to about AD 1300–AD 1400, displays broader landscape transformation and evidence of intensified forest and crop management.
Archaeological features include circular and quadrangular ditches, drainage canals, elongated cultivation platforms, and clusters of mounds, an engineered system designed to channel water, control floods, and create cultivable and habitable spaces in a seasonally inundated environment. The variety of forms suggests centuries of local experimentation rather than a single, uniform plan, the authors wrote.
Excavations showed a diverse pre-Hispanic diet
Excavations also exposed a remarkably diverse pre-Hispanic diet. Fish, including wolf fish, peacock bass, and the South American lungfish, dominated faunal assemblages, alongside caimans, turtles, and mammals such as capybaras, pacas, and armadillos. Botanical remains point to the use of maize, legumes, and multiple palm species, including moriche, corozo, cumare, totai, palmita, and peach palm, consistent with a mixed economy of fishing, hunting, gathering, and cultivation.
The study emphasizes that the region, part of the Llanos de Moxos, the largest wetland in the Amazon basin, has long been a biocultural landscape. The lakes lie within the Municipal Protected Area of Grandes Lagos Tectónicos de Exaltación and are included in the Río Yata Ramsar wetland complex, recognized for ecological and cultural significance.
Researchers worked in close coordination with local Indigenous peoples. Representatives of the Cayubaba Indigenous Council, which encompasses 21 Cayubaba and Movima communities, helped identify research areas, guided access to culturally significant sites, and requested that certain places remain untouched, the study notes. Field seasons during the COVID-19 pandemic were grounded in dialogue and respect, the authors said.
Engineered wetlands offer models of biodiversity-rich, food-adapted systems that work with the seasons
The findings challenge persistent notions of the pre-Columbian Amazon as a sparsely inhabited wilderness and underscore Indigenous knowledge in the Bolivian Amazon as a source of resilience. At a time when deforestation, large-scale agriculture, and climate change threaten the Amazon, the paper argues that the engineered wetlands offer models of biodiversity-rich, flood-adapted food systems that worked “with the rhythms” of seasonal inundation.
“Archaeological evidence shows centuries of diversified livelihoods integrating farming, fishing, and forest management in flexible ways,” the authors wrote, adding that these long-term practices enabled communities to transform seasonal floods into productive opportunities.
Although the construction and use of raised fields eventually declined, likely after demographic collapse and social disruption following European contact, the authors say that does not diminish the sustainability of the systems themselves. They urged that conservation of the Llanos de Moxos honor both its environmental value and the living cultural heritage of the people who have tended the landscape for generations. The study’s authors said the new data should inform conservation and management of the Yata River Ramsar site and bolster collaborations that bring together archaeology, ecology, and Indigenous stewardship to confront present-day environmental challenges.
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