Communities living in Colombia thousands of years ago achieved an engineering wonder of the world based on cooperation among family groups without top-down government, a new study shows. Archaeologists argue that policymakers in Colombia should now adopt a similar strategy to solve the country’s current water management crisis.
The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast you can see them from a plane at high altitude. Their canals and raised fields – in use from the first centuries BC until the 11 th century AD – cover an astonishing 500,000 hectares, roughly the same size as the Grand Canyon National Park, or three times the size of London.
It has traditionally been assumed that powerful rulers must have ordered and managed such an ambitious infrastructure project because of its complexity and the amount of work thought to be involved. In a study published today in Communications Sustainability , however, a University of Cambridge-led archaeological team argues that the work was most likely locally-led, cooperative, and much faster than previously assumed.
The findings are important historically but also offer hope to Colombians today who are suffering from a water management crisis linked to climate change, intensive farming and policy failure.
“These field systems are so impressive that people have assumed they were achieved by hierarchical chiefdoms. Our data tells a very different story,” said the study’s lead author, Dr Jasmine Vieri, from the University of Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
“Our findings indicate that local communities were capable of building these systems in very short periods of time, and organising themselves rather than relying on a powerful external force.”
The societies responsible for these hydraulic systems in La Mojana were contemporary with the Maya, and with the broader Mesoamerican and Andean state-level societies, which culminated in the huge Aztec and Inca empires a few centuries later. The pre-Hispanic populations occupied an area where, the researchers point out, there is no evidence of state-level societies. It has been assumed – encouraged by evidence of elaborate gold work and ceramics – that they were hierarchical chiefdoms on their way to state formation. By contrast, the new findings support the idea that these people chose to organize themselves far more horizontally and were able to achieve great things.
Their raised field system managed huge quantities of water during heavy rains, gradually redirected it in drier months, buffering against both drought and floods. The network of canals redistributed water from permanent bodies of water around raised areas of housing. The system provided more fertile soils for cultivation in dry seasons and may have helped locals to trap fish.
Using satellite imagery, the researchers mapped a 500-hectare portion (roughly 700 football pitches) of Pre-Hispanic field systems in the municipality of San Macros, Sucre. They studied the infrastructure at an unprecedented level of detail, recording the dimensions and volume of 1,600 ridges and 63 housing platforms. They worked out that when first constructed the formations were around 1.4 metres high from the top of the ridge to the lowest point of the canal.
The international team – including researchers from the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), and University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain – then developed a new method to quantify the labour needed to build this system and considered the social and spatial organization most likely to have underpinned this work.
Dr Jasmine Vieri said: “We are confident that one of these canal-ridge systems could have been built in less than two months, around half of a dry season. That’s a far lower labour investment than has been previously assumed, and manageable through cooperation.”
The researchers factored in volumes of moved earth, as well as information about local geology, indigenous working practices, population density and available technology. Starting from an estimated population of 1,600 people in the study area, they based their calculations on a workforce of 800 people which, the researchers emphasise, represents a conservative estimate, given ethnographic evidence that men, women and probably children traditionally engage in subsistence farming.
Soils in the Colombian Caribbean are heavy clay which would have made the work harder and there were no metal shovels in the region in this period. The workers may have used wood tools but this remains unproven.
The study springs from Cambridge’s ERC-funded REVERSEACTION project , which investigates how technologies are sustained in stateless societies, and how collective action can achieve great things without coercion.
Professor Marcos Martinon-Torres, REVERSEACTION’s lead and senior author, said: “Arguments for centralised, top-down planning, unsupported by data, risk obscuring the agency of indigenous pre-Hispanic populations. Pre-Hispanic societies were inventive and cooperative, they worked with nature rather than trying to obstruct it. And we already know that recovering ancestral practices has positive societal impact today through local populations connecting with their heritage through technology.”
Evidence for the use of raised field systems in this region ends before the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century. It isn’t clear why they stopped being used but it has been suggested there was population movement from the lowlands towards mountainous areas.
The researchers argue that the pre-Hispanic sustainable solution to water management can be adopted by local populations without the need for state intervention. Instead of redistributing water flow, the Colombian government has often adopted the opposite strategy of attempting to block water flow to prevent flooding and adapt the land for agricultural and livestock activities based on models designed for non-flooding environments. But dykes have proven incapable of holding water back. Since 2021, the Caregato dyke has suffered multiple breaches, causing losses for local communities and ecosystem damage. At other times, the region suffers from severe droughts.
Study author Dr Fernando Montejo Gaitán, from the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History (ICANH), said: “Policymakers have shown interest in these ancient systems, but lacked data. Our study is the first to show that these sustainable solutions can be organised locally and collectively. Local people may need resources from the state but not necessarily state intervention.”
The researchers have made their code open source to enable researchers to apply the same methods to data sets relating to other regions.
Reference
J. Vieri, F. Montejo Gaitán, M. Carrero-Pazos, M. Martinón-Torres, ‘Collective labour and sustainability of pre-Hispanic field systems in La Mojana’, Communications Sustainability (2026). DOI: 10.1038/s44458-026-00128-5
Media contacts
Jasmine Vieri (University of Cambridge): jmkv2@cam.ac.uk
Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: tom.williams@admin.cam.ac.uk / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 444
Communications Sustainability
People
Collective labour and sustainability of pre-Hispanic field systems in La Mojana
11-Aug-2026