Past analogues of sustainable food production under climate change scenarios: assessing pre-Columbian large-scale practices’ viability in flood-prone environments

MOMPAST aims to investigate pre-Columbian practices of raised fields in wetlands, where earthworks were designed to cope with frequent flooding events. The study site chosen is the Mompos Depression (Colombia), one of the largest perennial Neotropical wetlands that hosts an estimated 5000 km2 of relict pre-Columbian raised fields, platform mounds, and canal-causeways, attesting to large-scale human management of these environments. This project will use a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to better understand the role of pre-Columbian land management strategies in influencing feedbacks between hydrology, ecosystem services, and food production. Moreover, we will study the viability of these ancient practices for large-scale food production in flood-prone environments, as IPCC projections suggest will occur. MOMPAST will use a novel combination of both well established and recently developed palaeoecological and archaeological proxies to independently study different environmental drivers that operate at several temporal and spatial scales including: sediment provenance/flood events, anthropogenic soil alterations, erosion and soil degradation, human activities and the vegetation responses to these drivers. The wide array of proxies will facilitate the study of the nature, extent and use of the large-scale pre-Columbian raised fields agricultural practices. The idea behind MOMPAST lies in the study of these ancient practices to assess their viability as a sustainable option for agriculture and bioeconomy, aimed at securing the food production in large tropical areas vulnerable to flooding events due to future climate change.