Suchergebnisse

Amazonian archaeology has made major advances in recent decades, particularly in understanding coupled human environmental systems. Like other tropical forest regions, prehistoric social formations were long portrayed as small-scale, dispersed communities that differed little in organization from recent indigenous societies and had negligible impacts on the essentially pristine forest. Archaeology documents substantial variation that, while showing similarities to other world regions, presents novel pathways of early foraging and domestication, semi-intensive resource management, and domesticated landscapes associated with diverse small- and medium-sized complex societies. Late prehistoric regional polities were articulated in broad regional political economies, which collapsed in the aftermath of European contact. Field methods have also changed dramatically through in-depth local and regional studies, interdisciplinary approaches, and multicultural collaborations, notably with indigenous peoples. Contemporary research highlights questions of scale, perspective, and agency, including concerns for representation, public archaeology, indigenous cultural heritage, and conservation of the region's remarkable cultural and ecological resources.

The Amazon basin is accepted as an independent center of plant domestication in the world. A variety of important plants were domesticated in the Amazon and its surroundings; however, the majority of plants cultivated today in the Amazon are not domesticated, if this descriptor is understood to convey substantial genetic and phenotypic divergence from wild varieties or species. Rather, many domesticates are trees and tubers that occupy an intermediate stage between wild and domesticated, which seems to be a prevailing pattern since at least the middle Holocene, 6,000 years ago. Likewise, basin-wide inventories of trees show a remarkable pattern where a few species, called hyperdominant, are overrepresented in the record, including many varieties that are economically and symbolically important to traditional societies. Cultivation practices among indigenous groups in the Amazon are embedded in other dimensions of meaning that go beyond subsistence, and such entanglement between nature and culture has long been noticed at the conceptual level by anthropologists. This principle manifests itself in ancient and dynamic practices of landscape construction and transformation, which are seriously threatened today by the risks posed by economic development and climate change to Amazonian traditional societies and biomes.