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Updated: May 1, 2025
The milpa system of agriculture involves clearing the forest by fire, destroys valuable humus and forces the farmer to seek new fields frequently. Montaña: Jungle, forest. The term usually applied by Peruvians to the heavily forested slopes of the Eastern Andean valleys and the Amazon Basin. Oca: Hardy, edible root, related to sheep sorrel. Quebrada: A gorge or ravine.
On some vast hillside capable of producing food for a multitude the eye made out a single milpa, or tiny corn-field, fenced off with huge slabs of mahogany worth easily ten times all the corn the patch could produce in a lifetime or rather, worth nothing whatever, for a thing is valuable only where it is in demand.
A small fire had been burning on the ground. Near the embers were two old black ollas of Inca origin. In the little chacra, cassava, coca, and sweet potatoes were growing in haphazard fashion among charred and fallen tree trunks; a typical milpa farm. In the clearing were the ruins of eighteen or twenty circular houses arranged in an irregular group.
The agente rode with us in the morning quite a league upon our road, to a place which he was clearing for a milpa. We had heard so much of the horrors of the road to El Salto, that we were prepared for the worst. It was not an abrupt descent, as we had expected, but for the most part level, over black mud.
Often applied to a piece of prehistoric pottery. Mañana: To-morrow, or by and by. The "mañana habit" is Spanish-American procrastination. Mestizo: A half-breed of Spanish and Indian ancestry. Milpa: A word used in Central America for a small farm or clearing.
He sang for us the invocation to the winds of the four quarters, which they use in the ceremony of planting time. Though he is frequently employed to say the "milpa mass" and to conjure, he claims that he never learned how to use the sastun, but told us that another h'men in his village knew it well.
The walls had tumbled down, but gave no evidence of careful construction. Not far away, in woods which had not yet been cleared by the savages, we found other circular walls. They were still standing to a height of about four feet. If the savages have extended their milpa clearings since our visit, the falling trees have probably spoiled these walls by now.
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