South America: Amazonia and Orinoco Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Browne Ribeiro.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Amazonia is the consummate, perpetual, wild jungle. Despite a century of archaeological research pointing to rich, complex, and culturally diverse ancient societies, and twenty years of mounting geoarchaeological evidence for densely settled Precolumbian towns, many people still imagine Amazonia as a pristine, primordial forest. In this paper, I dig deep into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Myrtle Shock. Claide Paula Moraes. Manoel Fabiano Silva Santos.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Thirty years after its first excavations, Caverna da Pedra Pintada continues to be one of the only sites in the Brazilian Amazon that dates to the Pleistocene–Holocene transition (over 12,000 cal BP). As such, understanding this site is pivotal to the interpretation of early human occupations and transformations of the tropical forest. Archaeobotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charlotte Robinson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological studies show that pre-Columbian communities began modifying Southwestern Amazonia approximately 3,500 years ago. Previous research within lowland Bolivia has primarily focused on the fields and forest islands that populations built to elevate themselves and their crops from seasonal flooding. However, a series of zigzag earthworks...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Ellis. Anna Browne Ribeiro. Filippo Stampanoni.

We analyze settlement organization and landscape modification at Macurany, a pre-Colonial terra preta site on the Middle Amazon River in Parintins, Brazil, within local and regional contexts. Pre-colonial land modifications dot the contemporary landscapes of Amazonia. Many such landscape features, such as anthrosols, elevated platforms, mounds, ramps, and riverine ports, are used today by contemporary inhabitants of Amazonia. New data gathered at Macurany reveals that ancient Amerindians altered...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rachel Johnson.

Modern kichwa-speaking Runa peoples inhabit much of Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. Ethnographic study focusing on Runa communities of both the Pastaza and Napo Rivers indicate these groups share many of the views, collectively known as Amazonian Perspectivism, that characterize numerous lowland cultural groups. This paper will detail some of the ways in which Runa persons perceive and interact with their environment, focusing on relations with socially salient plants and animals thought to be persons,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heckenberger. Wetherbee Dorshow.

The Anthropocene is defined here as the time when human-induced alterations of the environment become a driver of regional and global climate. The Amazon has very deep histories of human alterations of forest systems, but settled occupations that dramatically altered forest structure in regional systems of Late Holocene age, particularly following the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), ca. 900-1300 CE. Global population loss in the Old World, beginning in the 13th century, and the demographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Grace Ellis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I analyze anthropogenic landscape modification at Macurany, a pre-colonial terra preta site on the Middle Amazon River in Parintins, Brazil, in order to gain insight into settlement formation and organization. Settlement patterns and artificial landscapes are the result of human action, technological innovation and ingenuity. Understanding anthropogenic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonas Gregorio De Souza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human expansions motivated by the spread of farming are one of the most important processes that shaped cultural geographies during the Holocene. The best known example of this phenomenon is the Neolithic expansion in Europe, but parallels in other parts of the globe have recently come into focus. Here, we examine the expansion of four archaeological cultures...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Wyatt. Laura Furquim.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological excavations at the sites of Jacupí, Carrazedo, and Gurupá in the Lower Xingu in the Brazilian Amazon have implemented a significant program for the recovery of plant remains, resulting in a large archaeobotanical assemblage currently undergoing analysis. Recent...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Heckenberger.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two decades of relentless agropastoral development has reduced the closed tropical forests to small patches in most of northern Mato Grosso, within the so-called “arc of deforestation” along the southern margins of the Amazon’s closed tropical forests. There are larger blocks in two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Madeline Blanchard.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1998, ornithologist John P. O'Neill donated a vast ethnographic collection of objects he was gifted from fellow researcher Charles Fugler or purchased from local persons in Pucallpa, Peru, during his time studying birds in the Peruvian Amazon. According to O'Neill, the cultures responsible for these items' creations are the Cashinahua, Aguaruna, Achual,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Feest. Viviane Luiza da Silva.

From the Philosophical Voyage to Brazil of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira in 1791 to the Brazilian fieldwork of the young philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss from 1936 to 1938, nearly 4000 Bororo artifacts and more than 300 Kadiwéu pots were collected for museums in Europe and the United States by naturalists, anthropologists, missionaries, artists, and adventurers. What began as part of the project of the Enlightenment to catalog the world based on the principles of Linnean taxonomy turned into a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Thiago Kater. Jennifer Watling. Fernando Almeida. Eduardo Neves.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Human agroforestry and landscaping practices in the Amazon Forest are now well-accepted phenomena among Amazonian archaeologists. Along the Amazon River, the oldest evidence of visible landscape modifications is largely associated with contexts in which pottery from the Pocó-Açutuba Tradition is identified, from 3,500 years BP. This tradition, in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Lozada Mendieta. Patrick Quinn. José Oliver.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The “Cotúa Reflexive Archaeology Project” (2015–2018) directed by José R. Oliver (UCL, UK) included a ceramic research analysis in the Venezuelan Middle Orinoco area, specifically in three archaeological sites of the Átures Rapids region, to identify trading and interaction process in precolonial ceramic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Iriarte.

This is an abstract from the "Dedication, Collaboration, and Vision, Part I: Papers in Honor of Tom D. Dillehay" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a mentor, Tom Dillehay has formed and influenced me and archaeologists from the southern cone of South America on a variety of themes, including the peopling of America, plant domestication, and the arrival of monuments. In particular, Dillehay had a significant impact on how we think about the uses,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonas Gregorio De Souza.

This is an abstract from the "Global Perspectives on Climate-Human Population Dynamics During the Late Holocene" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Climate change has been linked to the reorganisation of past societies in different parts of the globe. However, until recently, the lack of archaeological and palaeoclimate data for the Amazon had prevented an evaluation of the relationship between climate change and cultural change in the largest...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Iriarte. Mark Robinson. Shira Maezumi. Daiana Travassos. Denise Schaan.

In this presentation, we discuss pre-Columbian Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) polyculture agroforestry systems and its implications for management and conservation efforts on Amazonian sustainable futures under current threat from climate change and development. We present and compare new multi-proxy paleoclimate, palaeoecological and archaeobotanical data from two mid to late Holocene records of land use history of ADE in Santarem (Lower Amazon) and the Itenez Forest Reserve (SW Amazonia). Our data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Helena Pinto Lima. Bruno Moraes. Wetherbee Dorshow. Michael Heckenberger.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper describes the development and implementation of the AIKAX Portal, a digital database that consolidates the data of more than three decades of ethnographic and archaeological research and collections among the Kuikuro indigenous people of the Upper Xingu. The Xingu Indigenous Territory (TIX) encompasses 20,000 km2 in the southern portion of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Davis.

Among large-scale societies, esoteric knowledge is often exploited for power, prestige, or status. In such a social framework, it becomes important to guard the transmission of esoteric knowledge, restricting access by exclusive mechanisms of indoctrination or co-option. When discovered, evidence of guarded knowledge often flags the attention of the archaeologist because of its often meticulous preservation. However, if the same knowledge were conspicuous, unguarded, and socially mundane,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aaron Cathers.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Decades of archaeological research in the Amazon Basin have shown that micron-sized freshwater sponge spicules (silliceous skeletal elements) feature prominently in many pre-Columbian ceramic traditions. This distinct technology allowed potters to craft fracture-resistant vessels and contributed to the stylistic particularities of their wares. Though several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walker. Neil Duncan.

Donald Lathrap was a visionary anthropologist and archaeologist. His contributions always reflected the "big picture": an understanding that all pre-Columbian culture history was intertwined, and that these connections went back through time to origins in the lowland tropics, or the Tropical Forest. He practiced an archaeology that gave equal weight to iconography and religious thought, and rim sherds and energetics. The most significant issues for Lathrap’s version of American Archaeology, is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martijn Van Den Bel.

This is an abstract from the "Coloring Outside the Lines: Re-situating Understandings of the Lifeways of Earliest Peoples of the Circum-Caribbean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ancient ceramics (beyond 2000 BC) have been found in the western part of the Guianas, notably in the coastal swamp areas of Guyana from the 1950s onward (Alaka). They are also known from the Courantyne River in Suriname (Kauri) and have only recently come to light in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lilian Rebellato. Denise Paul Schann. Wenceslau Geraldes Teixeira. Antônia Damasceno Barbosa. William Woods.

In this paper, we will bring a geoarchaeological perspective in order to identify settlement patterns in two geometric earthworks (geoglyphs) located in the eastern region of the state of Acre in the Brazilian Amazon. Physical and chemical soil analysis suggests how the past inhabitants on those sites affected the soils. The results show that the settlement pattern and the most important differences from the other regions we have looked at, for instance, in the várzea (floodplain) area. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliana Rubinatto Serrano.

This is an abstract from the "Stability and Resilience in Zooarchaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last two decades, archaeological science in the Amazon has recognized the complex human forest management systems that co-constructed a hyper-productive forest environment. The study of how protein procurement strategies, particularly fishing, were integrated into past Amazonian economies has also improved with excavations of a few sites...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Russell Greaves. Karen Kramer.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We investigate the pro-sociality of frequent cultural dances among a group of South American hunter-gatherers living in an impoverished environment. Savanna Pumé foragers of the llanos of Venezuela hold 11-hr night dances 36% of all nights sampled during 30 months of ethnoarcheological fieldwork. The Savanna Pumé live in a hyperseasonal environment with...