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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]