This book explores the interplay between a people, their physical environment, the means of mobility that connect the two, and how these elements combine in the creation of cognitive and cultural landscapes. Specifically, it examines how Indigenous Warrau people in the village of Imbotero, Guyana, use traditional dugout canoes in the surrounding swamp forest and on connecting waterways; how canoes mediate between the Warrau and their landscape; and how the relationship is bi-directional: that is, how people use boats to conceptualise and exploit the landscape while, simultaneously, the landscape influences culture, cognition, and boat use.

The book traces the history of the Warrau canoe from the earliest evidence of prehistoric use to the present. It describes how dugout canoes are built and handled, how they form the basis of Imbotero's economy and culture, and how they enable access to, and exploitation of, the environment. It explores the roles of age, gender, and social status in canoe use, examines the fading spiritual component of canoe construction, and discusses challenges to the Warrau's canoe heritage, with suggestions of how that heritage might be safeguarded. The role of the physical environment upon culture is analysed within Christer Westerdahl's maritime cultural landscape (MCL) framework, which is applied here for the first time to a contemporary swamp society. The swamp is shown to be fully compatible with the MCL concept, in that watercraft and their daily use play central roles in the people's engagement with the environment, their worldview, and their identity.

Autorentext

Bob Holtzman holds a PhD in Archaeology and a Master of Arts in Maritime Archaeology from the University of Southampton and a Master of Marine Affairs degree from the University of Rhode Island. He studies the design, construction, and use of vernacular watercraft outside the Western plank-on-frame boatbuilding tradition, with a particular focus on logboats (i.e., dugout canoes). In addition to fieldwork in Guyana for the present work, he has done ethnographic studies of logboats in Belize and Ecuador and researched archaeological logboats in Britain. Author of the blog Indigenous Boats (indigenousboats.com) for more than 15 years, Dr. Holtzman has worked as an Acquisitions Editor for International Marine/McGraw Hill and as Communications Director for the Penobscot Marine Museum in Maine. The author of three books on wilderness survival and camping skills, he also wrote a series of educational books about boats for children. He is currently co-editing a book on the huri logboats of the Middle East-Indian Ocean region.