Mound Building, Social Complexity and Horticulture in the Lower Paraná River

BONOMO, M.; POLITIS, G.

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Springer

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2018; p. 1 - 20

Pre-Hispanic earth mounds, known as ?cerritos,??cerros,? ?túmulos,? ?lomas,? ?islas,? ?bordos?and ?montones? (in Spanish), ?aterros? and?tesos? (in Portuguese), and ?îvî choví?(in Guaraní), across southeastern South Americaare one of the most conspicuous cultural manifestations preserved in the vast lowlands. In mostcases, these mounds are located in flood zones.They have been interpreted as a specific adaptivestrategy used by different South American indigenous populations, from the middle Holocene, tooccupy fluvial plains that are periodically floodedand have high biodiversity. The use of land to buildstructures with dry surfaces for settlement and otherfunctions allowed them to access the rich aquaticand terrestrial resources available within these environments surrounded by rivers, lagoons, and wetlands. Many of these mounds are in the huge LaPlata River basin (Fig. 1), in its main tributariessuch as the Upper Paraguay River, the Lower andMiddle Paraná River, the Lower Uruguay River, ineastern and northeastern Uruguay, southeasternBrazil, and possibly in Esteros del Iberá, althoughthe Iberá area has not been systematically studied.Hundreds of elevations were recorded in the floodplain between the Dulce and Salado rivers of Santiago del Estero. Some of them are natural leveeswhose upper parts were unintentionally elevated bypeople (Martínez et al. 2011), and some otherswould be artificially built mounds with depressionspossibly linked to sediment extraction (Togo 2004).Within the La Plata basin, small earth mound structures were also recorded in a few sites of theso-called San Francisco Culture in Jujuy province(Ortiz 2003).