ABSTRACT
What have become of Guiana’s savannas since the Conquest?It is difficult to specify when indigenous peoples abandoned raised-field farming practices. It is likely that this had already occurred in Guiana by the time of the Europeans’ arrival. However, there are a few exceptional mentions of this practice in the region in historical archives (Figure 58). Raised fields were still cultivated in the Venezuelan savannas from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries (Gumilla [1745] 1963). Some rare cases are attested to in the following periods, but the drop in population occasioned by disease epidemics limited the size of indigenous groups, who no longer had reasons or means to continue to produce and maintain these works.
