Learning about dams on the Madeira

I confess that I am not very well informed about the construction of dams along the Madeira River, so I thought that it would be good to bring together some sources that relate to these issue. Here is an open access article from PLOS one that collates information about many dams in what the authors call Andean Amazonia, in order to assess the biological and ecological changes that will be brought about by dam construction at these two sites. The Santo Antonio and Jirau dams on the Madeira, just down stream of the Bolivian border in Brazil, were dubbed "critic proof" by the Wall Street Journal (sorry, that article is behind a paywall), but I have not read in journalism or academic literature about these their impacts. Survival International also has more information about the effects of dam construction on local indigenous people. Since the Madeira drains all of the Llanos de Mojos, these constructions presumably could change all of the seasonal patterns of drainage and flooding.

Ring villages by Wüst and Barreto

Wüst and Barreto 1999:16

This map shows an example of a ring village from Southern Brazil, described by Irmhild Wüst and Christiana Barreto, in an article in Latin American Antiquity *. Many of the earthworks are about 100 to 200 yards across, and several dozen of them are described and mapped. In the article they call on Amazonian archaeologists to investigate the distribution of this kind of occupation across the Amazon, the role such rings might have played in the pre-Columbian past, and their relationship to the ethnographic record. Many archaeologists have taken up this challenge, both in Brazil and Bolivia. As the rainforest is cleared, more and more of these landscape features become visible from satellite imagery. 

[*(Wüst, Irmheld and Cristiana Barreto, 1999, The Ring Villages of Central Brazil: A Challenge for Amazonian Archaeology, Latin American Antiquity 10(1):3-23)]