Pre-Columbian Roads of the Amazon

an efficient means of transportation and communication. Societies need to move goods, people, and information throughout the regions they control. Roads also have powerful social, political, and sacred functions. Formal roads are major transformations of the environment. Their patterns on the landscape provide information about the organization of settlements, social interaction, land tenure, ritual, standards of measurement, and the activities of everyday life (Trombold 1990). important places of the past. The cultural landscape of paths, roads, field walls, irrigation canals, terraces, and other features that fill the spaces between sites is often ignored. A relatively new subfield of anthropology, the archaeology of landscapes, treats the landscape as an artifact that can provide new, detailed insights about the everyday lives of peoples of the past. I will focus here on formal roads as an important element of the pre-Columbian landscape of the Bolivian Amazon.