Search

During the twentieth century, Amazonia was widely regarded as relatively pristine nature, little impacted by human history. This view remains popular despite mounting evidence of substantial human influence over millennial scales across the region. Here, we review the evidence of an anthropogenic Amazonia in response to claims of sparse populations across broad portions of the region. Amazonia was a major centre of crop domestication, with at least 83 native species containing populations domesticated to some degree. Plant domestication occurs in domesticated landscapes, including highly modified Amazonian dark earths (ADEs) associated with large settled populations and that may cover greater than 0.1% of the region. Populations and food production expanded rapidly within land management systems in the mid-Holocene, and complex societies expanded in resource-rich areas creating domesticated landscapes with profound impacts on local and regional ecology. ADE food production projections support estimates of at least eight million people in 1492. By this time, highly diverse regional systems had developed across Amazonia where subsistence resources were created with plant and landscape domestication, including earthworks. This review argues that the Amazonian anthrome was no less socio-culturally diverse or populous than other tropical forested areas of the world prior to European conquest., (© 2015 The Author(s).)

The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organized in articulated clusters, representing small independent polities, within a regional peer polity. These patterns constitute a "galactic" form of prehistoric urbanism, sharing features with small-scale urban polities in other areas. Understanding long-term change in coupled human-environment systems relating to these societies has implications for conservation and sustainable development, notably to control ecological degradation and maintain regional biodiversity.

For centuries Amazonia has held the Western scientific and popular imagination as a primordial forest, only minimally impacted by small, simple and dispersed groups that inhabit the region. Studies in historical ecology refute this view. Rather than pristine tropical forest, some areas are better viewed as constructed or 'domesticated' landscapes, dramatically altered by indigenous groups in the past. This paper reviews recent archaeological research in several areas along the Amazon River with evidence of large pre-European (ca 400-500 calendar years before the present) occupations and large-scale transformations of forest and wetland environments. Research from the southern margins of closed tropical forest, in the headwaters of the Xingu River, are highlighted as an example of constructed nature in the Amazon. In all cases, human influences dramatically altered the distribution, frequency and configurations of biological communities and ecological settings. Findings of historical change and cultural variability, including diverse small to medium-sized complex societies, have clear implications for questions of conservation and sustainability and, specifically, what constitutes 'hotspots' of bio-historical diversity in the Amazon region.

Archaeology and indigenous history of Native Amazonian peoples in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil reveal unexpectedly complex regional settlement patterns and large-scale transformations of local landscapes over the past millennium. Mapping and excavation of archaeological structures document pronounced human-induced alteration of the forest cover, particularly in relation to large, dense late-prehistoric settlements (circa 1200 to 1600 A.D.). The findings contribute to debates on human carrying capacity, population size and settlement patterns, anthropogenic impacts on the environment, and the importance of indigenous knowledge, as well as contributing to the pride of place of the native peoples in this part of the Amazon.

The nature and extent of past indigenous transformations in the Amazon basin is an actively debated topic, and one that has important implications for both conservation policy and the cultural heritage of its indigenous and traditional populations. The use of charcoal and phytoliths to measure past human impacts in non-lacustrine settings has become especially influential in this debate but has also generated disagreement among scholars regarding the possible limits of these proxies for detecting ancient land-use. To contribute empirical data to this issue, our paper presents the first attempt to study charcoal and phytolith signals from areas of modern indigenous land-use, in the Xingu Indigenous Territory, southern Amazonia. Our findings show that, while charcoal and early successional herb phytoliths are good indicators of land-use intensity, certain types of land-use leave subtler traces in the phytolith record that can hinder their detection. We demonstrate how using finer sampling resolution and comparing local proxy data on their own terms are necessary steps in order to identify trends in human land-use across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 littie 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 multiculrural 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]