Social Implications from Agricultural Taskscapes In The Southwestern Amazon

Across the Americas, but particularly in the Amazon Basin, precolumbian farmers invested their labor in features such as canals, causeways, and raised fields, creating agricultural landscapes. These landscapes required organized action in order to build and maintain them. Such actions can be usefully described as tasks to draw specific connections between communal work and landscape features (Ingold 1993). Using two parallel examples front the precolumbian Bolivian Amazon, this article presents landscape features as correlates of the variety and scale of tasks that compose the processes of creating and managing them. Data come from remote sensing and pedestrian survey. The execution of some tasks affects the execution of others, meaning that landscapes are the result of overlapping, interdependent communal tasks. This taskscape perspective allows landscapes to be compared with greater precision and shows that details of local spatial and task organization are important to understanding agricultural change. The comparison of two taskscapes reveals details of daily life and intensive agriculture that are obscured by the classification of societies as states or chiefdoms