Carl O. Sauer

Land and life : a selection from the writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer

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Indian Food Production in the Caribbean

THINK for a moment of the map of the world, of the globe. Think of South America as accessible on land, and see how it is the farthest end of the world that was available to the dispersal of mankind. Now there are the difficulties of the high latitudes; there are the difficulties, less it is true, of the desert, and then there is the difficulty of the tropical rain forest. And I want to speak about that for a moment. At least the eastern half of Panama, perhaps more than that, and the western part of what we know as Colombia and a long stretch of coast down to the south are one of the rainiest areas that we have, and it can hardly have been anything else than a very great tropical forest at the time that human migrations began into South America. Yet the curious thing about South America is that of all the world it has perhaps the greatest linguistic diversity and in an extreme degree, which probably means that people had been coming in little bands for a long time, pushing through and getting into South America and staying there. There were good opportunities for some of them down there. But here is an extraordinarily, almost fantastically diversified lot of people and language, and this is, after all, one of the ways in which we recognize old, old differences in people. They must have gotten through many, many times for a quite long period of time. There is one thing that eased it a bit; there is little doubt that these migrations were under way before the sea levels reached their present level. There is probably not much hazard in saying that the sea was at least 100 feet lower in the early part of this migration than it is now, and that under these circumstances two of the obstacles, the great marshes and estuaries of the drowned country that we know as the Gulf of San Miguel [southeastern Panama] were drained, as was the very great marsh and forest land of the Rio Atrato. But still you have the formidable problem of a tropical rain forest than which there is almost nothing that is less providing for man in the way of sustenance. Probably you are better lost in the desert if you have water than if you are in a tropical rain forest in terms of living off the country. And yet we have this indirect but quite interesting illustration of the many kinds of people and the many times in which people came through there quite freely. I am saying that the beachcombing opportunities, the strand-living opportunities, were the first decisive things in admitting man into this area, and they are quite interesting. On the Pacific side, we have the advantage of an ocean with a high tidal range, with a relatively large vertical difference for tidal collecting. The collecting from a tidal fauna is of considerable diversity and quite large amount. And back of the strand line you have the beach which is also of considerable interest, especially in this part of the world because of the fact that we are in one of the great sea-turtle areas of the world. The harvest