Pioneer Settlement in Eastern Colombia 



By Raymond E. Crist and Ernesto Guhl 1 



[With 8 plates] 



INTRODUCTION 



One of the last great frontiers in the world is the vast tropical rain 

 forest found on both sides of the Equator in Africa and South America. 

 Extensive desert areas have been made fruitful as technical develop- 

 ments brought them life-giving water. The cold lands of Canada and 

 Eurasia have experienced great development during the past half 

 century as man became better and better equipped to cope with the 

 cold. To be sure, millions of people, engaged in agriculture and house- 

 hold crafts, do live in tropical lowland areas, such as the islands in the 

 Caribbean and the Pacific, as well as on the mainland of monsoon 

 Asia. But hundreds of millions of acres in the wet lowland tropics 

 of Africa and South America are still covered by a rank growth of 

 dense forest, and other millions of acres are grasslands or savannas. 

 These vast tracts have remained an almost 100-percent physical en- 

 vironment, on which man has seemed barely able to make a dent, in 

 contrast to the continental expanses of Eurasia and northern North 

 America, which are about 100-percent cultural landscape. But these 



1 The senior author is professor of geography, University of Florida at Gaines- 

 ville. His field and library work for this article was made possible by a grant 

 of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Observations along the 

 Pasto-Mocoa route and a reconnaissance trip from Neiva to Florencia were made 

 in 1949 while he was stationed in Popayan, Colombia, as cultural geographer of 

 the Institute of Social Anthropology of the Smithsonian Institution, in charge 

 of its Colombian program of collaboration with the Instituto Etnologico of the 

 Universidad del Cauca. The wholehearted cooperation of the junior author, in 

 the field, in library research, and in the organization of material is hereby grate- 

 fully acknowledged. 



The junior author, one-time professor of geography in the Escuela Normal 

 Superior, later technical collaborator in the Instituto Colombiano de Antro- 

 pologia, and at present director of the Comision de Planeamiento de la Seguridad 

 Social Campesina, Ministry of Labor of Colombia, acknowledges his indebted- 

 ness to those organizations in helping to make possible his contribution to this 

 article as well as to the geographic literature of his adopted country. 



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