South America: Amazonia and Orinoco Basin (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Chacon.

This is an abstract from the "Magic, Spirits, Shamanism, and Trance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This lecture will focus on the multifaceted world of shamanism. The presentation will show how shamans serve as vast repositories of traditional indigenous knowledge and native beliefs. The effectiveness of shamans as health care practitioners will be considered. The ingestion of mind altering substances by Amazonian shamans as part of their curing...

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 Barbara Oosterwijk. Linda Hurcombe. José Iriarte.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Experimental research holds great potential for answering questions about the materiality of rock art, revealing insights into the practice of creating images and what it can tell us about the people who produced them. At Cerro Azul in Amazonian Colombia, multi-disciplinary documentation methods revealed that hand depictions were created using a variety of...

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 Ferran Cabrero-Miret.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the last fifty 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, as the Andes to its western border. More recently, carrying capacity and...

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 Eduardo Neves.

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Middle Horizon was a time of political centralization in the Andes. During the same period one sees in the Amazon clear evidence of population growth, settlement nucleation and landscape transformation, as it is attested by the increase in site size, the production of anthropic soils, construction of...

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...