A new study reveals that early farmers in what is now Colombia achieved an ‘engineering wonder of the world’ by building a giant irrigation system thousands of years ago.

Cooperative Effort

Communities living in the Colombian Caribbean created the remarkable network based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government.

The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana are so vast you can see them from an aircraft at high altitude. Their canals and raised fields — in use from the first centuries B.C. until the 11th century A.D. — cover an astonishing 500,000 hectares, three times the size of London today.

Study lead author Jasmine Vieri said, ‘These field systems are so impressive that people have assumed they were achieved by hierarchical chiefdoms. Our data tells a very different story.’

The team says their findings, published in the journal Communications Sustainability, are important historically but also offer hope to Colombians today who are suffering from a water management crisis linked to climate change, intensive farming and policy failure.

Local Solution

The pre-Hispanic sustainable solution to water management can be adopted by local populations without the need for state intervention. Study co-author Fernando Montejo Gaitán said, ‘Policymakers have shown interest in these ancient systems, but lacked data. Our study is the first to show that these sustainable solutions can be organized locally and collectively.’

Original reporting: KTBS 3 (Shreveport) — read the source article.