South America: Amazonia and Orinoco Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Vargas Ruiz.

Although for northern South America it has been proposed that warfare was an important mechanism that elites used to promote their authority and the institutionalization of their leadership during precolonial times, the evaluation of the available evidence is still not systematic. This presentation offers a comparative discussion about warfare in the Llanos of the Orinoco. The archaeological evidence suggests that warfare in the Llanos played a differential role in the historical and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Watling. Tiago Hermenegildo. Thiago Kater. Fabian Menges.

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mounting archaeobotanical and archaeogenetic data show that the southwestern Amazon region had an important role to play in the history of South American maize dispersal, acting as a “secondary improvement center” for primitive lineages that arrived in the region during the Middle Holocene (>6500 BP). How these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bruna Rocha. Vinicius Honorato. Márcio Amaral. William Balée.

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. Located in the Xingu-Tapajós interfluve, the Terra do Meio is currently made up of a mosaic of protected areas and Indigenous reserves. This case study considers the relationship between the riverine traditional communities (who call themselves *beiradeiros) of the upper Iriri River and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wetherbee Dorshow. Michael Heckenberger.

In the southern Amazon, two decades of rapid agro-pastoral development, extreme drought, and forest fires in the "arc of deforestation" threaten to precipitate an ecological oscillation of southern transitional forests from an eco-region dominated by closed tropical forest to one of open savanna and woodlands. Collaborative research conducted with the Kuikuro indigenous community in the Xingu River headwaters, involving archaeology, soil science, paleoecology, remote sensing, geospatial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Plew. Louisa Daggers.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Guyana’s shell midden complex, which stretches across its northwestern coast, documents more than 7,500 years of human land use. Traditional interpretations of the middens have assumed a degree of environmental constancy save for fluctuating Holocene sea levels associated with species found in marine and brackish waters. This study provides a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Lozada Mendieta.

This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic analyzes in precolonial archaeological sites in the Orinoco followed cultural history and ecological and evolutionary frameworks. However, the co-occurrence of different ceramic styles within common periods in multicomponent sites was not fully addressed, sometimes assuming it was the result of trade or from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samuel Martin.

The Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia, a seasonally flooded savanna region in the western Amazon lowlands, has several types of artificial landscape modifications that point to a significant pre-Columbian occupation with some approximately as old as 500BCE. These earthworks include 40-50,000 raised fields which were used as a regional-wide agricultural technique to grow a variety of crops. This paper focuses on the relationship of these fields to their hydrological environment. Using GIS in conjunction...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jelly Juliane Souza De Lima.

This is an abstract from the "From Individual Bodies to Bodies of Social Theory: Exploring Ontologies of the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many Amerindian worldviews, commensality pervades to different degrees both mundane and ritual spheres, being a way of caring and building relationships as revealed by available information from ethnology and ethnohistory. Based on these issues, this paper explores the central concepts of body...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eduardo Neves.

The archaeological record of the Middle Holocene is lacking in many areas of lowland South America. The reasons for such hiatuses are yet not clear, but there is an emerging pattern showing that the areas where one finds complete records of human occupation that span most of the Holocene are typically located on estuaries, extensive floodplains or other wetlands normally placed at ecotones. On the other hand, mounting paleoeocological data shows that the climatic conditions of the Middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ferran Cabrero-Miret.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last 50 years, from Amazonian archaeology there has been a remarkable and growing debate about the origin and dispersion of the cultures of the area, their carrying capacity, population number and density, political structure, and links with the adjacent geographical areas, such as the Andes to its western border. More recently, paleobotanical...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danielle Young.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon is a tropical savanna that saw increased archaeological attention beginning in the latter half of the 20th century. However, paleoethnobotanical research has been limited up until this decade despite significant results and great potential. Paleoethnobotanical inquiry in Mojos can enhance our understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Álvaro Fernández-Llamazares. Victoria Reyes-García.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine the traditional beliefs on supernatural gamekeepers by the Tsimane’ hunter-gatherers of Bolivian Amazonia. As other Amazonian Indigenous groups, the Tsimane’ believe in the existence of supernatural spirits (known as a’mo in Tsimane’ language) who own much of the natural world, including wildlife and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carla Jaimes Betancourt.

This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ethnic and linguistic diversity of the southwestern Amazon is one of the greatest in the world. This diversity is reflected in settlement patterns, types of monuments, spatial planning and use, cultivation techniques, and also in ceramic production. From AD 400 to the present, numerous ethnic groups of the Llanos de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Camila Figueiredo.

From the 10th until the 18th century, the Tapajó Indians inhabited the present city of Santarém and the surrounding region. The material culture associated with this group is distributed between the Trombetas and Xingu rivers - west/east - and Almeirim until the middle Tapajós Rivers – north/south. Archaeological and ethnographic data demonstrate that the Tapajó produced the elaborate Santarém pottery. This particular region is characterized by a rich and varied archaeological modified landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chacon.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper investigates the belief in Supernatural Gamekeepers/Animal Masters of wildlife in three South American indigenous societies: the Tukano of Colombia, the Embera of Colombia, and the Achuar of Ecuador. Findings show that Supernatural Gamekeepers/Animal Masters are believed to grant success to hunters who...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joanna Troufflard.

The socio-political organization of the Tapajó people living in the Lower Amazon region during late precolonial times has been studied through two main sources: contact chronicles and archaeological data coming from the Santarém site located at the mouth of the Tapajós River. Based on these sources, researchers have formulated three models to explain the socio-political organization of the Tapajó. However, recent surveys and excavations conducted in the upland Belterra plateau provide new data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stéphen Rostain.

Sangay, Ecuador, is probably the most prestigious and impressive site in Amazonia. It is indeed an immense establishment regrouping dozens complexes of artificial earthmounds and a network of endless paths dug along the edge of a terrace of the left bank the Upano. Many archaeological sites have been found in this narrow and straight Upano Valley has been modified over tens of kilometers in length by the pre-Columbian, but few of them have been excavated. Does this multitude of interconnected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gabriela Prestes Carneiro. Roberta Sá Leitão-Barboza. Myrian Sá Leitão-Barboza. Claide de Paula Moraes.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animal management and domestication have been widely studied in relation to terrestrial mammals; however, there are still debates over what “domestication” means for aquatic animals. Across the Amazon, in recent years, a great number of archaeological structures such as fish weirs, canals, ponds, and turtle and fish corrals have been documented, dating...