Entrenched

In one of the earlier posts, I mentioned that the landscape of the Upper Xingu (UX) region features some sets of deep trenches. For their part, the Kuikuru attribute the trench construction to one of their gods, Fitsi-Fitsi. According to oral legend, Fitsi-fitsi was basically a man who one day decided to whittle his right leg into a sharp point--"his weapon." When he realized that his family in the village had locked their doors and refused to open them when they found out what he had done, Fitsi-fitsi gathered "his people" (the myth is vague about to whom this refers) and set out for the forest. It is said that whenever he came across a place that would be suitable for his people to reside, he used his pointed leg to make deep ditches. These semicircular trenches, he explained to the people, would serve as shelter from cold winds. He would leave a group of his people there to form a village, and continue on until he found another spot, marking it in the same fashion. This process continued until he reached what is today known as Kuhikugu, the southernmost known Kuikuru settlement, where he settled and apparently still lives today.

Now, I'm hardly one to dismiss legends as having no explanatory merit, but I can't help feeling like there's something more to the ditches than being created by a pointy-legged village-maker. And many anthropologists agree.
One alternate explanation that was proposed linked the trenches to the region's peccary problem--that because the crafty peccaries were consistently finding ways to bypass the fences that the Kuikuru had constructed around their manioc gardens, the Kuikuru resorted to building ditches to trap the unwary peccaries.

  Prized, tasty manioc 

 

          +

Aww, look, a hungry peccary. How cute!

=  PROBLEM!               




That brings us to...

Hypothesis 1: The trenches were constructed as traps for peccaries

However, there are a few wrinkles in this theory. For one, building these trenches would have been no small business--some have been recorded to be as deep as 17 feet, and 3 feet across! That would have been a substantial undertaking--would the peccary protection be worth all of that effort? 17 feet is quite deep, and kind of overkill. 
Hypothesis 1: The trenches were constructed as traps for peccaries

The end result does not merit such a time-/energy-consuming effort. REJECTED.

I think we can put this hypothesis on the back-burner and investigate the region a little more to see what else we can come up with. 

Mike Heckenberger has done extensive excavation and mapping of these regions, which he shares with us in his book The Ecology of Power. 

This is the Kuikuru settlement region of the UX that we're looking at (page 70):



 The three numbers with the red squares around them (X6: Nokugu, X13: Heulugihïtï, X11: Kuhikugu) are the three sites at which Heckenberger conducted the most fieldwork. That dark black squiggle that runs from the northwest part of the image to the southeast is the Culuene River. Back in the day (we're talking way back, like,1200s a.d.) the Culuene was essentially the divide between two cultures, the Arawaks and the Caribs. These tribes both inhabited the Upper Xingu region, but settled on different sides of the Culuene (Arawaks on the west, and Caribs on the east) and developed their own cultures, which we'll talk more about later.

The Kuikuru are descendants of the Caribs, which is why there is a red circle around X14: Tehukugu--one of the oldest known Carib settlements in this region.

X41: Itsagahïtï also has a red circle around it because archaeologists can't definitively determine whether its ruins represent the Arawak culture (aka "Western Complex") or the Carib culture (aka "Eastern Complex"). Evidence is scarce, and thus inconclusive.

Now, for the interesting part.

 When analyzing the ditches, Heckenberger noticed that there seemed to be some correlations between the ditches and the water source of each settlement: in almost every instance where there were ditches, they were arranged so that they arced around the occupational part of the settlement, beginning and ending at the water source. This close association was pounced on by those who had suggested the ditches were intended to have an irrigation function.

Hypothesis 2: The ditches were constructed as part of an irrigation system.

But one (significant) detail didn't add up--the ends of the ditches that bordered the water source lay far beyond the high-tide mark of the bodies of water. The trenches were way too far away for them to ever be filled up! Now, perhaps the groups had engineered some sort of ancient water-getting system that channeled water into the ditches and we simply have no record of it. That would make this hypothesis possible--but not probable. Since we have no evidence (physical or part of oral history) of such a machine, we're going to need to put this hypothesis aside.

So we've discarded the "peccary trap" and the "irrigation system" hypotheses.
What are we left with?

Let's re-examine Heckenberger's map of the region (page 70):

This time, the sites that are circled are those that supposedly exhibit peripheral ditches (PDs)--the ditches that completely encircle the village occupation area, described by Heckenberger as "semi-lunar." (X13: Heulugihïtï, for instance, features 3 ditches, but they are tiny and do not circumscribe anything. Because the ditches of X13: Heulugihïtï deviate so drastically from the observed norm, it would not be accurate to assume that their purposes were the same, and thus our focus will be primarily on the large trenches that surround the villages).

This list of PD sites includes:

X6: Nokugu

X18: Akagahïtï

X11: Kuhikugu

X17: Hatsikugi

X40: Sekuhai [Heckenberger has not actually examined the PDs at this site; knowledge of their existence comes only from modern Kuikuru testimonies. Since their presence cannot be concretely confirmed by Heckenberger himself, we will not include this site in our analysis.]

What is interesting to note is that these sites featuring PDs are also those that, based on Heckenberger's excavations, happened to be the major residential centers of this region. Which means there would be a lot of people living there. Also, based on Heckenberger's discovery of specialized structures (i.e. buildings whose blueprints were upgraded) at X18: Akagahïtï plus remnants of complex road systems and sprawling central plazas that go above and beyond similar organization at the other sites, it can be inferred that some pretty important people lived at these sites enclosed by PDs. (Maybe even chiefs! Let's remember this for later when we evaluate evidence in favor of/against the presence of a chiefdom in this area.)

Usually where there are important people (or things), there are also certain developments of security.

17-foot deep trenches would make a pretty good defensive strategy, don't you think? Especially if the threat were a bit more menacing than hungry peccaries, like, say, hostile humans.

This leads us to...

Hypothesis 3: Trenches were constructed to protect villages from human attack.

Here's an example of such a formation, observed by Heckenberger at X18: Akagahïtï (page 94):

The dark, solid black lines represent the trenches.

The other vein-y lines that look like roads represent, well, roads. And the giant circle you see in the center represents a central plaza. Upon excavation, Heckenberger found the foundations of two circular settlements in the area indicated by my faintly drawn square (one of which is the specialized structure that I mentioned him citing earlier!).

The open area to the northeast is where the Ipatse Stream runs by the settlement. Though it is not depicted in this GPS plan that Heckenberger offers, the stream would run right by each of the end points of these ditches, effectively serving as the final (and natural) piece of the barrier. The plaza and the settlements, then, would be safely encircled by the trench-water combo.


 

Here's a copy of Heckenberger's map of X11: Kuhikugu (page 99):

This site actually had two ditches.

As you can see, there is a ditch that I've colored red which runs along the interior, as well as an external ditch. It is this external--or peripheral, as Heckenberger uses--ditch that runs essentially from bank to bank around X11: Kuhikugu.

This settlement, X11: Kuhikugu, is the same, old settlement that we discussed earlier when recounting the legend of Fitsi-fitsi. The southern end of the ditch is where, according to Kuikuru legend, Fitsi-fitsi still lives.

Finally, X6: Nokugu is the site that Heckenberger spent the most time analyzing, and thus will be the site that we'll consider most closely (since there is an abundance of data) (page 82):

Heckenberger has spent a lot of time conducting soil samples, and from these stratigraphic tests has been able to give 900 a.d. as an estimated year for the beginning of a settlement in Nokugu. Since there are no records of permanent Carib settlements west of the Culuene River until 1770 or so, it is likely that the Arawaks were the initiators of this occupation. As you can see, there are three concentric ditches here (weird!!!).

 We'll explore the implication of the trio later, but for now let's focus on the dates of each one. Normally I would have us start with the smallest ditch, ditch 3, the most interior one. However, Heckenberger was not able to get a clear reading on its age, and is in the process of re-dating it. So we move to ditch 2, the middle ditch! Radiocarbon dating puts the construction of ditch 2 somewhere in the range of 950 a.d. - 1210. Thus, not only were the Arawaks the initiators of the occupation of X6: Nokugu, it was the Arawaks who presumably built the ditches as well.

Finally, for the most peripheral and all-encompassing of the trenches, ditch 1. Here's a picture (page 85):

According to soil samples as well as dates collected from pottery shards found in the ditch, ditch 1 was constructed around 1290 a.d., +/- 70 years.

It measures about 17 feet deep, and a little over 3 feet wide. That's a pretty substantial undertaking!

 Pretty deep, huh? Once the majority of anthropologists had focused on considering warfare/defensive purposes to provide a motive for the construction of the ditches, the question "Defense from whom?" After all, if it happened that there was no one from whom the tribe would need to protect themselves, taking all that time and effort to build such a ditch would be pretty pointless, right? To fill in that hole in the argument, then, we need to assess the potential threats in the area.

I think we've analyzed enough evidence for one post, and we've established that the defensive purposes of the ditches espoused by Hypothesis 3 appear to be the most viable motive behind their construction.

Next we'll consider the potential suspects. Could the Arawaks have been guarding themselves from wild indian attacks? Were the Carib groups based to the east of the Culuene River the threat? Was it the Tupian-Gê tribes? Or could it have been inter-tribe hostility?
It's back to the books to find out!

Stay tuned!