South America: Amazonia and Orinoco Basin (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (87 Records)
Recent research has confirmed that the some of the oldest ceramics of the Americas are associated with Amazonian shellmounds. Excavations at Monte Castelo site produced a representative assemblage of these early technologies, and has also demonstrated a long history of ceramic production and use, with significant changes during the Middle Holocene that accompany the intensification of landscape management and the emergence of several other cultural innovations in that period. In this...
Monumentality and Social Complexity in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon: Mound Builders in the Upano Valley, Ecuador (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Upper amazon frequently was conceived as a transitional area where social development was limited for the scarce resources and the harsh environmental conditions. In the last decades studies in the ceja de selva, pie de monte and the upper amazon reveal that this region hosted an intense cultural development. Wide discussions in the academic forums...
My Grandfather’s Castanhal: Plants, Community, Territory, and Memory in the Brazilian Amazon (2018)
In contemporary Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, life is largely shaped by movement of, and among, plants. Plants here are mobile, but spend most of their lives stationary. In this paper, I examine the relationship between people and plants – as living, but nonetheless spatially rooted elements of the landscape – in these agroextractivist communities. I explore the significance of planting and plant life in regulating territorial use and notions of rights, access, and...
OCA—Culture, Origins, and Environment: Archaeological Collaborative Research in the Lower Xingu (2021)
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. The project investigates the historical ecology of a poorly studied area: the confluence of the Xingu and Amazon Rivers, in the lower Amazon region. By investigating distinct lines of archaeological evidence on a regional scale, it addresses, as an underlying research theme, the...
Organic Inclusions in Amazonian Ceramics: A Petrographic Approach (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Organic inclusions, such as freshwater spicules (cauixi) and tree bark ash (caraipé) are one of the most diagnostic elements of pottery production in the Amazon basin. At the Monte Castelo shell mound (southwestern Amazonia), Bacabal pottery represents the widespread use of sponge spicules in the ceramic paste,...
The Origin of the Amazonian Ceramic Diversity Seen from the Monte Castelo Shell Mound (2023)
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. In this presentation we will bring the latest archeological data from the Monte Castelo shell mound, one of the most important ceramic sites of the Amazon. Some of the oldest ceramics of the continent are found there and in this symposium the characteristics about the emergence of Bacabal phase and the new data about the...
The Origins of Amazonian Cuisine: Archaeobotanical Study of Hunter-Gatherer Subsistence Systems in Limoncillos, Colombia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeobotany of Early Peopling: Plant Experimentation and Cultural Inheritance" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previously, it was thought that Amazonian Rainforests presented a barrier for the early colonists of the South American continent. Moreover, these environments were regarded as having few sources of calories and were not inhabited until food production systems were established by humans elsewhere. Recent...
An Overview of Ancient Funerary Practices in Oriental Amazonia: A Regional Bioarchaeological Approach for Amapá, Brazil (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeology and ethnology have shown that the relationship between the living and the dead in Amerindian societies in Amazonia is a fundamental element for understanding their lifeways in the past and present. Archaeological research on funerary practices in the Amazon region has revealed a variety of body treatments and burial patterns over the last 2,000...
Palisades, Ponds, and House Gardens: Phytolith Analysis on the Functionality and Importance of a Ring Ditch in Llanos de Mojos, Southwestern Amazonia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Southwestern Amazonia, the seasonally flooding, anthropogenic landscapes of Llanos de Mojos may be associated with the domestication of several important crops such as manioc (Manihot esculenta), peanuts (Arachis spp.), peach palm (Bactris gasipaes), and chili pepper (Capsicum baccatum). These landscapes, which increased the productivity of the...
Participatory Mapping and Self-Management of Territory among the Kuikuro of the Upper Xingu, Amazonia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The use of cartography for land management is not new. However, the use of geotechnologies as instruments for strengthening indigenous communities, including the self-management of their territories, constitutes a new and wide-ranging possibility for the application of these tools. Participatory community mapping and territorial self-management are...
Petrographic and Technological Analysis of Ancient Polychrome Ceramics from Upper Madeira River, Amazonia (2023)
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. Several researchers have been showing that the southwestern Amazon is a center of cultural innovation and diversity in lowlands South America. Archaeological studies carried out in the last decades have also revealed that the region has ancient centers of ceramic production. At the upper Madeira River, southwest Amazonia,...
Precolonial Ceramic Tradition and Cariban Language Family in Amazonia: Do They Match? (2023)
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 origins and the dispersal of the most widespread language families in the world is one of the enduring problems that bring together archaeology, linguistics, and genetics. In Amazonia, archaeological research has tentatively associated ceramic traditions (grouping different technological styles) and the expansion of...
Precolumbian Low-Density Urbanism in the Llanos de Moxos (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation summarizes archaeological and lidar data from the Casarabe culture (~500-1400 CE) in the Llanos de Mojos savannah and forest mosaic in southwest Amazonia. Lidar revealed a four-tiered settlement system that spread over 4,500 km2 with large extensive...
Predation and Production in the Rock Art of the Middle Orinoco: Food for Thought (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Intangible Dimensions of Food in the Caribbean Ancient and Recent Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interpretation of rock art is fraught with difficulties, even when images may appear to be easily identified with cultural objects or elements found in nature. When considering the possible meaning of images of animals, plants, and artifacts depicted in the rock paintings and petroglyphs in the Middle...
Prehispanic Warfare, Leadership and Demography in the Llanos of the Orinoco, Northern South America (2018)
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...
Preliminary Insights into the Biocultural Trajectory of Maize in Southwestern Amazonia (2023)
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...
The Pristine Myth and Its Consequences for Amazonian Forest Peoples: An Example From the Upper Iriri (2021)
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...
Recent Investigations in the Upper Xingu Basin (2018)
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...
Reconstructing Holocene Coastal Adaptations: An Evaluation of the Archaeological Shell Midden Record along Guyana’s Northwestern Coast (2023)
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...
Reconstructing Technological Traditions and Interaction in the Precolonial Middle Orinoco: Ceramics in Mono- and Multiethnic Communities in the Amazon Basin (AD 1000–1500) (2023)
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...
A Relationship between Seasonal Flooding and Raised Agricultural Fields in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia (2018)
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...
Return to Yarinacocha: A pXRF and Petrographic Study of Ceramics Artifacts from the Tutishcainyo Site Series (1400 BCE–900 CE), Ucayali, Peru (2024)
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. When Donald Lathrap excavated a series of related archaeological sites on the shores of Yarinacocha, an oxbow lake of the Central Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon, the elaborately decorated pottery and long-occupied sites he uncovered contradicted the prevailing narrative of the Amazon as a...
Ritual Commensality in the Lower Amazon on the South of Amapá State, Brazil, During the Precolonial Period (2019)
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...
The Role of Lowland Tropics as Centers of Landscape Domestication during the Middle Holocene in South America (2018)
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...
Río Chico in the Distant Past of the Pastaza Valley, Ecuador (2023)
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...