Quickly recognized as a classic, the book provided an enduring image of South American Indians to the outside world. He saw them as primitive humankind living in a raw state of nature that for millennia had existed almost without change. Holmberg reported that the Siriono lived with want and hunger and could neither count nor make fire and seemed to practice no religion except for an uncrystallized conception of the universe. Holmberg lived among them, and published an account in 1950 of his experience in Nomads of the Long Bow. Between 19 a young doctoral student in anthropology named Allan R.
The Siriono are the best known of a number of Native American groups in the Beni today. The Beni was a very important center of a pre-Columbian civilization known as the hydraulic culture of Las Lomas (the hills), a culture that constructed over 20,000 man-made artificial hills, all interconnected by thousands of square kilometers of aqueducts, channels, embankments, artificial lakes and lagoons as well as terraces. The grasslands were maintained and expanded by regularly setting fire to large parts of them, which is still done today to maintain the savannah for cattle.
Clark Erickson, an archaeologist, says this picture is mistaken in every respect: the landscape of the Beni was constructed by a populous, technologically advanced Indian society more than a thousand years ago. Much of the savannah of the Beni is natural, but there is evidence that the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grasslands by fashioning fish-corralling fences among the causeways. Thirty years ago, the understanding was that Indians lived there in isolated groups and had so little impact on their environment that after millennia the continents remained mostly wilderness. Each mound is stabilized by broken pottery that is mixed into its earthen construction and rises as much as sixty feet above the flood plain, allowing trees to grow that cannot live in water. Scattered across the landscape are numberless island-like earthen mounds topped by forests and bridged by raised berms up to three miles long. On the border with Brazil there is a nearly flat Bolivian province called the Beni, the size of Illinois and Indiana together.
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