[Aztlan] slash and burn agriculture

[Diehl, Richard]

Dear Listeros,

Five more centavos! I would like to follow up on the comments by J. L. Baker and Jules Siegel concerning the feasibility of cutting down forests with stone axes. This issue concerned me quite a bit back in the 1960s when I was studying modern peasant farming in southern Veracruz as part of Michael D. Coe's Yale University Rio Chiquito project, and later when we wrote the two-volume In the Land of the Olmecs. We looked to the modern farmers to give us ideas about how the ancient Olmecs might have handled their environment and I was especially concerned with farming. How did the Olmecs (or the Maya, Amazonian Indians or other tropical farmers) cut down forests with stone tools? Nick mentioned one idea that occurred to us, girdling and killing trees so that they shed their leaves but remained standing. That may have been practiced but somehow I doubt it, for several reasons. I do remember that back in the 1960 an anthropologist named Charles J. Erasmus did a study in Yucatan in which he had men clear fields (I suspect fairly high forest) using stone axes. He showed that while it took longer than with steel tools, the time difference between the two methods was not all that great. Unfortunately, I cannot locate my copy of his publication, nor can I find a citation. It was not the other study he did involving people moving stone to build mounds. I also remember some similar studies in New Guinea at about the same time but do not have the citations. I have always felt that it would not be difficult to manage high forests and large trees with stone axes. For me the real problem would be cutting off low scrub brush, what Veracruzanos and Tabasqueños call "acahual" or "monte", without machetes. I suspect that was the real challenge for our early tropical agriculturalists. I will continue to try to track down these citations from the 1950s and 60s but if anyone knows them, please share. 

Dick Diehl