All Waters Are Holy. Water Management in Traditional Societies

In these lines I propose to show some examples of how traditional, non-industrial societies have managed water, scarce in many of their habitats and abundant in others, to adapt their life systems and obtain from them the resources they require.

Whatever the ecosystem, they all require water to live—including the most arid deserts—where flora and fauna manage this scarce resource obtained from underground sources that emerge in oases, through dew, or from torrential rainfall that occasionally occurs. Plants such as cactus adapt to these ecosystems by developing deep roots, succulent stems that store water, and thorns—modified leaves capable of absorbing moisture from the environment. Several types of cacti, especially those of the genus Opuntia, provide edible stems and fruits for humans, and the cochineal insect (Dactylopius coccus), producer of carminic acid, a dye that leaves good profits for those who harvest it, especially in Mexico and Peru, where they are planted for this purpose.

View of the Tahuayo river, a right-bank tributary of the Amazon. It is a blackwater river.

 Alberto Chirif

The desert fauna has its own adaptation strategies to survive in this arid environment of high temperatures; among them, nocturnal habits, physiological evolution to conserve water (highly efficient kidneys such as those of the kangaroo rat), humps like those of camels that store fat and water, thermal regulation by means of large ears to ventilate themselves like those of certain foxes, or scales and shells to avoid dehydration, such as reptiles.

Human beings also have their own strategies for adapting to aridity. Nomadic peoples organize journeys on routes of known oases and the most sedentary move their herds so as not to exhaust the pastures of a single place, using natural caves or tents for shelter, and wearing clothing that keeps air between the skin and the fabric and insulates the body from high temperatures.

ADAPTING TO THE DESERT
An example of more sophisticated systems of adaptation to the desert have been those developed by the ancient indigenous civilizations of the coastal deserts of Peru, through the construction of canals and aqueducts that allowed them to develop a thriving agriculture enough to feed large populations. The Moche or Mochica, one of the great civilizations of the northern coast of Peru, which flourished between the years 100 BCE and 800 CE, was a complex and socially stratified society that, through engineering works that included canals and dams, reclaimed land from the desert by irrigating several valleys. They grew corn, pallar (Phaseolus lunatus), beans, loche squash (Cucurbita moschata), peanuts, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and fruits such as lucuma (Pouteria lucuma) and soursop. They combined this activity with fishing boats (called caballitos or “little horses”) made of totora reed (Schoenoplectus californicus), a herbaceous plant, also cultivated, that thrives in aquatic environments, both in fresh water (as in Lake Titicaca and others) and saltwater, in coastal wetlands that are also rest stations for migratory birds. The hunting of deer and vizcachas (Lagostomus maximus), and the breeding of domesticated animals such as the cuy (Guinea pig, Cavia porcellus) and the llama complemented their diet of animal protein.

Forest flooded by the black water of the Tahuayo river, an environment known in Peru as tahuampa.

 Alberto Chirif

In the 1980s, Walter Alva, an important archaeologist who studied this society, argued in a conference that the Moche had irrigated more land than had been irrigated during 160 years of republican life Peru had until then. After almost 2000 years, the Moche canals are still used by farmers to irrigate their crops.

In the southern coast, the Paracas civilization (800 BCE-200 CE) thrived in the desert also by developing irrigation systems that efficiently managed scarce water sources. They used a technique known as “cultivation in pits” which involves digging to reach moist soil, where plants are planted. While the humidity favored their germination and growth, the sides of the hole provided them with shade and protected them from the action of winds. They cultivated a variety of plants for food such as corn, peanuts, pallar, cassava, beans, squash, chili peppers, guava, lucuma, and guava or pacay (Inga spp.) and cotton, which they processed to make the textiles that have made this society famous. Due to the proximity of the sea, they also practiced fishing. 

Neighbors of the Paracas were the Nasca (200 BCE to 600 CE), famous for the so-called “Nasca lines”, gigantic geometric designs, some of which represent animals and plants, which can only be appreciated in all their magnitude from the air. The Nasca took advantage of many of the contributions that the Paracas had developed, such as cultivation in pits, and promoted others, such as underground aqueducts built with flagstones, boulders, and huarango (Prosopis pallida) trunks, more than half of which are still used today by farmers. Through this irrigation system, the Nasca society ensured the supply of water to grow cotton, beans, potatoes, corn, vegetables, cassava, achira (Canna indica) and fruit trees. The aqueducts were dug on the slopes of the hills, where they captured the subsoil water that were led by gravity to the lower parts. From time to time, they built holes that allowed people to descend into the canals, to clean or repair them. Excess water was stored in reservoirs. 

The Paucartambo river, at an approximate altitude of 700 meters above sea level, forms the Perené river and, subsequently, the Tambo river, which, upon joining the Urubamba river, takes the name Ucayali. These are whitewater rivers.

 Alberto Chirif

WATER MANAGEMENT IN PRE-HISPANIC ANDES 
Andean, Inca, and pre-Inca societies built complex irrigation systems, composed of open canals lined with stones and underground aqueducts. They captured water from glaciers and rivers and stored it in reservoirs in anticipation of times of drought. They used to cover these channels to prevent shrinkage by evaporation. Along them they created small artificial waterfalls to oxygenate the water. They built platforms or terraces on the slopes of the hills, as immense steps, which they protected with stone walls. Although this technology existed long before the Incas, they perfected it and expanded it throughout various regions of the empire. In addition to expanding the cultivation areas without eroding the slopes of the mountains, the embankments regulated the water that passed from higher to lower terraces so the scarce resource was used with maximum efficiency. 

The Incas received from the ancient Tiahuanaco civilization (1500 BCE to approximately 1180 CE) the ridges technology called waru waru in Quechua and sucacollos in Aymara. It is an agricultural system that consists of building elevated platforms interspersed with water channels in areas near rivers or lakes like Titicaca, located at 3800 meters above sea level. These platforms can be up to 10 meters wide, 100 meters long and one meter high, while the channels that border the medians are up to one meter deep. Their purpose is to protect crops in areas of extreme weather, periodically affected by floods, drought, and frost. The water in the canals stores solar heat during the day and releases it at night, preventing frost that kills the plants. The nutrient-rich mud from the canals was used to fertilize the ridges at the end of each harvest. The community of Acora (Puno), with the support of national and international entities and NGOs, is currently making efforts to revitalize this technology. 

Sailing along the Ampiyacu river. The name comes from the Quechua language and means river of medicine or poison.

 Alberto Chirif

WATER MANAGEMENT IN THE AMAZON: PAST AND PRESENT
The Amazon River can be considered an immense cardiovascular system, whose heart is the Andes, which pump the water from the melting ice, and its aorta is an extensive central channel that changes names—Vilcanota, Urubamba, and Ucayali, or Marañón and Solimões—until finally adopting the name of Amazonas in different places: in Peru and the other countries of the basin, from the joining point of the Ucayali and Marañón rivers, at a place close to the city of Nauta, and in Brazil from the confluence of the Solimões with the Rio Negro, neighboring the city of Manaus. These are arbitrary names that do not consider a fundamental factor: the sources of this immense river. Along its route, thousands of veins, arteries and blood vessels irrigate the region and generate courses and bodies of water of different characteristics and denominations: rivers, streams, caños, sacaritas, furos, igarapés, cochas, aguajales, tipishcas, restingas, tahuampas, and renacales, among the best known; some using streaming water and others using stagnant water as long as floods do not stir them up. 

The basin is home to more than 2500 species of fish, of which more than 800 are found in Peruvian Amazon water, where 80 000 tons of fish are extracted annually, 75 percent for consumption and 25 percent for trade. 

Its sources, the headwater of the rivers furthest from their mouth in the Atlantic, are in the Peruvian Andes. They are in the birth of the Marañón, Apurimac, and Mantaro rivers. The first is formed by the melting snow of the Yapura mountain, at an altitude of about 5800 meters, in Huánuco, only 120 kilometers away in a straight line from the Pacific Ocean, in the border area of the Ancash, Huánuco, and Lima regions. The sources of the Apurimac river, as pointed out by Peruvian geographer Carlos Peñaherrera in the 1960s, are in the melting snow of the Mismi mountain, located in Arequipa, at an altitude of 5539 meters, a fact that was verified in 1982 by the expedition led by the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Finally, the Mantaro, which rises in Lake Junín, in the pampa of the same name, captures its water from the mountains of Rumi Cruz, at an altitude of 5220 meters. Although the latter river is 75 kilometers longer than the Apurimac, it has the problem that its flow is interrupted several months a year due to droughts, so its water do not complete the journey to the mouth of the Amazon. For this reason, the sources of the Apurimac, due to their extension, and the Marañón, due to their flow are considered the main sources of the Amazon. A series of other rivers that would take a long time to detail contribute to increasing the volume of these three sources; some of them originate in Peru and others in Ecuador, such as the northern tributaries of the Marañón: Chinchipe, Santiago, Morona, Pastaza, Tigre, Corrientes, and Napo, and in Bolivia and Colombia. 

View of the citadel of Kuélap, located at 3000 meters above sea level, in the eastern Andes, whose rivers flow towards the Amazon.

 Alberto Chirif

In their extensive routes, these rivers give life to varied flora, fauna, habitats, and crops adapted to the changing climate conditions and altitudes through which they flow, feeding societies with different cultures and languages. Before focusing my notes on the cultural scenario of the Marañón basin, I provide a typification of the rivers. 

Harald Sioli, a researcher at the Max Planck Society for the Promotion of Science, classified Amazonian rivers into three categories, based on the color of their water: white, clear, and black; an arrangement that is important to understand the ways in which flora, fauna, and humans adapt to different habitats. White rivers have crystal clear water in their headwater because they run through stony beds, but when they descend, they acquire a latte color due to suspended sediments they carry. Along the floodplains, these rivers deposit annually, during the emptying phase, silt that fertilizes the soils of the areas surrounding their channels. Most of them are born in the Peruvian Andes and the rest in Ecuadorian, Bolivian, and Colombian Andean mountain ranges. Flooded forests by these water are the most productive because they grow on deep soils with many nutrients.

The clear-water rivers are born in the Amazon rainforest itself and flow through sediments of crystalline rocks, silicates, and quartz. Their water are clean and transparent because they carry a low amount of nutrients and organic matter in suspension. They are common in Brazil.

Kuélap Citadel.

 Alberto Chirif

Finally, black rivers also originate in the Amazon itself and owe their dark tea color to the fact that their water wash away tannins and other substances from the decaying organic matter of the surrounding forests. Their water are very acidic and contain few nutrients, so their aquatic life is poor, both in fish and vegetation. The most conspicuous representative of this type of river is the Rio Negro, whose water, dark as far as the city of Manaus, acquire the latte color when they join those of the Amazon, due to the greater flow of the latter.

The highest parts of the Marañón basin offer a landscape that differs little from the characteristic Andean environment: scarce vegetation and fauna, dry weather, and scarce rainfall. However, at lower altitudes the climate becomes more humid and rainfall more frequent; here the forest line begins. In this strip of border between a dry and a humid habitat, the Chachapoyas culture developed between the years 800 and 1470, when they were conquered by the Incas, a dominion that was short-lived due to the irruption of the Spanish conquistadors in 1532. This culture had a great expansion through areas located east of the Marañón River, which are currently part of the departments of Amazonas, San Martín, and La Libertad. Their settlements are in an altitudinal range of between 2000 and 3000 meters, although they also managed lower areas for certain crops, and higher for the breeding camelids.

A river of hot water, so hot that bathing is impossible unless done at its confluence with a neighboring river of cold water. Located near the city of Contamana, capital of the Ucayali province, at an altitude of 135 meters above sea level. It flows into the Ucayali river, which, upon joining the Marañón river, forms the Amazon river.

 Alberto Chirif

It was a complex society, with specialists and class divisions, and a nucleus of political power in charge of organizing the great works, among which was the construction of houses and stone fortresses, and works related to agricultural work that stand out. Among the former are Yalapé, Purunllacta, and Olán, but above all, the administrative-ceremonial centers of Pajatén and Kuélap, which also played a defensive role.

In addition to channeling water for irrigating crops, they built terraces on the slopes of the hills to incorporate cultivation areas in an environment of difficult orography and to manage water, while reducing soil erosion. It is one of the civilizations that preceded the Incans in the use of platform technology. They cultivated tubers such as potato, mashua (Tropaeolum tuberosum), oca (Oxalis tuberosa), and olluco (Ullucus tuberosus), and grains such as quinoa and kiwicha (Amaranthus caudatus). They also developed grazing activities with camelids, and hunting and gathering. 

Following the course of the Marañón River, there are the territories of other indigenous societies, such as the Awajun and the Wampis who, unlike the Chachapoyas, do not practice agriculture, but horticulture in small clearings (chacras) open in the dense jungles, in which they plant mainly cassava, bananas, and other crops that provide them with carbohydrates, as well as medicinal and ceremonial plants such as ayahuasca. These are societies that in the past were interfluvial settlements, in small family units, generally between 40 and 60 individuals who, in addition to the farms mentioned above, obtained other foods through hunting, gathering, and fishing, although the importance of the latter was secondary because the rivers of the region do not have a great variety or quantity of fish. This explains their settlements in the past, small and dispersed, to take advantage of hunting areas. Their governance system is based on reciprocal relationships that articulate groups linked by ties of kinship and affinity. 

The so-called modernity, considered by many as the panacea for development, has dismantled this system by encouraging people to group together in villages of a size never before known to them (some of more than 2000 inhabitants) along the rivers that, as I have mentioned, do not offer them variety or quantity of fish, nor fertile alluvial lands since the banks of the rivers are stony.

Descending further along the course of the Marañón, after the Manseriche pongo (from the Quechua punku: gate, entrance, opening or cutting of the mountain range by a river) the panorama changes in the presence of the Amazonian plain. After receiving the water of the Huallaga river, the territory of the Kukama people begins, who, unlike the Awajun and Wampis, settle on riversides to take advantage of the alluvial soils on the banks that appear after the emptying phase, and of the variety and abundance of fish, as well as other animals of aquatic habits such as certain types of turtles, alligators, manatees (now a protected species, having been almost exterminated), otters, and ronsocos (capybaras). The water also feed the aguajales, Amazonian wetlands in which the aguaje palm (Mauritia flexuosa) thrives, covering more than five million hectares in the lower part of the Peruvian Amazon and constituting the only continuous forest formation in the region, since the other species are dispersed or, at most, grouped in small stands. The fruits are used to feed people but also have industrial potential to produce oil.

Aerial view of the Ucayali river, which, like the middle and lower reaches of the Marañón and the Amazon, lacks a fixed channel due to the absence of retaining banks. The abandoned meanders become lagoons, some of which in Peru are called cochas, and others tipishcas.

 Alberto Chirif

The Kukama live in an aquatic ecosystem, completely flooded during the filling phase, but fertile in alluvial soils left by the emptying and very rich in aquatic fauna that allows them to obtain products for food and market. These conditions are favorable for their settlements to be larger in size compared to those of interfluvial peoples. 

EXTREME PATHS
In these pages I have presented various adaptive strategies of native societies to environments and climates that are different from each other, which follow extreme paths: from maximum dryness to water in excess, and from intense cold to very high temperatures. All these strategies are threatened by pollution generated by extractive industries, deforestation, and misuse of resources, factors that, in turn, are conditioned by the ambition of a few, although disguised with the discourse of development.

Mrs. Rebeca Rubio, from the Bora indigenous community, squeezing the pulp of the “bitter” cassava (Maniot esculenta) to extract the prussic acid (cyanide), in order to turn a poisonous root into an ingredient to prepare casabe, a type of flatbread, and other foods.

 Alberto Chirif

Aboriginal societies have been able to take advantage of the adaptations of flora and fauna to these environments and, in turn, use them for their own benefit. To achieve this, they first observed the behavior of the elements of nature and through creative dialogue learned their adaptation strategies. Acquiring this knowledge—as any knowledge valuable to human life—requires humility, and the first step in this direction is to become aware of the arrogance implicit in the concept of “mastery of nature” manufactured by modern humanity, the one that belongs to industrial societies, who has blind faith in technology as a set of instruments with which they believe they can exploit the environment at will.

In its silent patience, nature takes revenge for mistreatment through avalanches, depletion of aquifers, storms, and, finally, when the situation has reached the climax of danger, with climate change and global warming.

The cassava bread already roasted.

 Alberto Chirif

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