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Pre-Columbian Floristic Legacies in Modern Homegardens of Central Amazonia
- Source :
- Repositório Institucional do INPA, Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA), instacron:INPA, PLoS ONE, Vol 10, Iss 6, p e0127067 (2015), PLoS ONE
- Publication Year :
- 2015
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2015.
-
Abstract
- Historical ecologists have demonstrated legacy effects in apparently wild landscapes in Europe, North America, Mesoamerica, Amazonia, Africa and Oceania. People live and farm in archaeological sites today in many parts of the world, but nobody has looked for the legacies of past human occupations in the most dynamic areas in these sites: homegardens. Here we show that the useful flora of modern homegardens is partially a legacy of pre-Columbian occupations in Central Amazonia: the more complex the archaeological context, the more variable the floristic composition of useful native plants in homegardens cultivated there today. Species diversity was 10% higher in homegardens situated in multi-occupational archaeological contexts compared with homegardens situated in single-occupational ones. Species heterogeneity (β-diversity) among archaeological contexts was similar for the whole set of species, but markedly different when only native Amazonian species were included, suggesting the influence of pre-conquest indigenous occupations on current homegarden species composition. Our findings show that the legacy of pre-Columbian occupations is visible in the most dynamic of all agroecosystems, adding another dimension to the human footprint in the Amazonian landscape. © 2015 Lins et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Subjects :
- Archeology
Time Factors
Time Factor
Context (archaeology)
Agroecosystem
Physiology
Biodiversity
lcsh:Medicine
Introduced species
Flowers
Species Composition
Phytogeography
Floristic
Pre Columbian
Rivers
Controlled Study
lcsh:Science
Historical archaeology
River
Multidisciplinary
Geography
Native Species
Amazon rainforest
Ecology
Brasil
lcsh:R
Species diversity
Species Diversity
Agriculture
Plant
Native plant
Nonhuman
Flower
Geographic And Geological Phenomena
Geological Time
lcsh:Q
Home Garden
Brazil
Research Article
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 10
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLOS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....aba29a80723f3c26f7e80dad25827f0a