ABSTRACT

The ridged field patterns, so conspicuous from the air, never seem to have been described in any of the archaeological or geographical literature on the Guayas basin. In Ecuador the concentration of tolas reaches its maximum at areas rather far removed from the ridged fields or raised planting beds, as around Milagro and Duale. The fields’ observable on the approach pattern to the Guayaquil airport, in seasonally flooded lands lying immediately west of the Rio Babayoho and south of the Río Los Tintos and the village of Saborondón, are mostly of this same rectangular platform type. The South American fields have a close parallel in the blocks of narrower linear "planting beds" described more than a century ago in the upper Mississippi Valley and around the southern end of Lake Michigan, and again in such southern counterparts as the Ocmulgee old fields near Macon, Georgia.