Forests of Plenty: Ethnographic and Archaeological Rainforests as Hotspots of Human Activity
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
In popular discourse rainforests are synonymous with ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’, battlegrounds between apparently pristine floral, faunal, and human communities and the unrelenting industrial and urban powers of the modern world. Indeed, in the 1980s, anthropologists and human ecologists argued that tropical rainforests were unattractive environments for long-term human navigation, subsistence and occupation. However, archaeological and anthropological research over the last two decades has increasingly demonstrated that the tropical rainforests of the Americas, Africa, and Asia have been persistent ‘hotspots’ of human subsistence and activity across prehistoric, historical, and ethnographic periods. This symposium aims to connect and compare the regional and temporal diversity of these rainforest ecologies, and their associated records of human occupation, in order to understand their desirability for our species and its close relatives. In doing so, this symposium explores the developing methodologies that are increasing the resolution with which we can study human rainforest demographies, adaptations, and practices, as well as the ecological resilience of different rainforest habitats to both anthropogenic and climatic pressures.
Other Keywords
Rainforest •
Agriculture •
bioarchaeology •
Ecology •
Human Ecology •
Experimental Archaeology •
Human Adaptation •
Fire •
Environmental Science •
Landscape
Geographic Keywords
AFRICA •
East/Southeast Asia •
South America •
United Mexican States (Country) •
Republic of El Salvador (Country) •
Belize (Country) •
Republic of Guatemala (Country) •
Republic of Vanuatu (Country) •
North America (Continent) •
Oceania
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-11 of 11)
- Documents (11)
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Borneo rainforest as a social artefact: insights from integrated methodologies in archaeology, ethnography, and environmental science (2016)
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Borneo has a 50,000-year record of Homo sapiens’ interactions with rainforest, a history assembled by the inter-disciplinary studies of human occupation evidence in the Niah Caves on the coastal plain of Sarawak. That project involved a collaboration in particular between archaeologists and environmental scientists, with studies for example in geomorphology, palynology, zooarchaeology, archaeobotany, palaeobiology, and material culture studies. More recent work by many of the same team in the...
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A combination of ethnoarchaeology, experimental archaeology and use-wear analysis as a mean to recover testimonies of past human activities in Southeast Asian rainforests. (2016)
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In order to recover the activities that took place a long time ago in the rainforests, it is desirable to have an idea of the ones which can possibly be carried out in this specific environment with the resources available. Such knowledge can be acquired by conducting field investigation among forest experts: local populations who currently inhabit it and rely on plants, animals and minerals for their daily subsistence. To be able to identify these activities in the archaeological record, it is...
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Contemporary human uses of forested watersheds and riparian corridors: hazard mitigation as an ecosystem service, with examples from Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela (2016)
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Humans have long favored settlement along rivers for access to water supply for drinking and agriculture, transport corridors, and food sources. Settlement in or near montane forests include benefits such as food and wood supply, and high quality water resources derived from watersheds where upstream human disturbance and environmental degradation is generally reduced. However, the advantages afforded by these floodplain and montane settings pose episodic risks for communities located there as...
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Holocene seasonality, mobility, and diet at Niah Cave (Sarawak, East Malaysia): new isotope results on rainforest foragers and farmers? (2016)
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Assessment of fine-grained proxies to infer paleoclimate and paleoecology in tropical Southeast Asia is hampered by the coarseness of the archaeological record. Advances in technology, however, do permit fresh insights into past rainforest ecologies using isotope ratios from tooth enamel, albeit with very real spatial and temporal limitations. This is especially true for isotopic analysis of incremental growth layers in human tooth enamel. In this paper, oxygen and carbon isotope ratios are...
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Integrating archaeological riverine and forestry survey methods for assessing human occupation in Central African forests. (2016)
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Heavy vegetation cover presents obvious difficulties in conducting archaeological survey in the Central African rainforests. Survey conducted in 2010 and 2013 along the Congo River and its tributaries, between Bumba and Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of Congo, centered on using rivers as a means of access into dense forests.The results indicated that the region's archaeological record consists primarily of pottery finds associated with old soil horizons or pottery arranged in...
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Introducing Forests of Plenty: biological, temporal, regional, and methodological diversity in human rainforest adaptations (2016)
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In the 1980s, anthropologists argued that tropical rainforests were unattractive environments for long-term human navigation, subsistence and occupation. Yet, far from being pristine ecologies, the rainforests of Africa, Asia, Melanesia, and the Americas are increasingly being shown to have shaped, and been shaped by our species from at least 45,000 years ago, if not earlier. However, in many instances, archaeologists and anthropologists have concluded that early humans were occupying and using...
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Light islands in a sea of dark rainforest: Human influence on fire, climate and biodiversity in the Australian tropics (2016)
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The use of fire in Australian Aboriginal society has been well documented and has been pivotal to arguments about human impact on the Australian biota. Continuous and well-dated palaeoecological sequences from the humid rainforests of NE Queensland are beginning to reveal detailed records of vegetation transformation and shifting fire regimes within rainforest environments. The archaeological record is also providing new insights into plant exploitation and adaptation strategies to enable people...
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Pre-Columbian Agro-forestry, Production Cycles and Forest-to-forest Conversion in Southern Amazon Garden Cities (2016)
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This paper considers landscape domestication in the Upper Xingu region in the southern Amazonian transitional forests of Brazil. Archaeological research provides detailed information on major late Pre-Columbian settlements, ca. 1000-500 BP, within an environmental history to >30,000 BP and cultural history extending over the past two millennia. Late Pre-Columbian agricultural systems involved forest farming and agro-forestry, including forest conversion within patchy, mosaic forests, including...
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Reconstructing the peopling of the deep interior of the equatorial rainforest of Kalimantan (2016)
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Previous archaeological discoveries by Soejono (1977) and Chazine (2010) at Nanga Balang and Diang Kaung in the deep interior of Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) have documented human occupation there at c. 3000 BP. But sites closer to the coastline of Borneo, especially the Niah Caves in Sarawak, have yielded chronologies indicating a much greater span of late Pleistocene (50 Kya onwards) to Holocene occupation. So, did hunter-gatherer populations also exist in the deep interior of Borneo...
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A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma: what can Central African Sangoan and Lupemban technologies tell us about the origins of rainforest foraging? (2016)
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Despite almost 100 years of scientific research, the archaeological record of Central Africa remains stubbornly peripheral to ongoing debates centering on the origins of rainforest hunting and gathering. Currently available chronological, palaeobiogeographical and technological data converges to indicate that the initial settlement of the central African rainforest belt may have been first undertaken c.300 ka BP by archaic Homo sapiens. The appearance of new tools suitable for hafting as stone...
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Variety of Rain Forest Subsistence Strategies. A Comparative Overview (2016)
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A large scale comparative research project on the state of the peoples living in the Rain Forests of Central Africa, the Guyana’s in South America and in Melanesia, has highlighted the anthropic character of tropical rain forests. It has particularly underlined the strong correlation between biodiversity and cultural diversity and how domesticated and wild resources interact in the various subsistence systems. Activities associated with shifting cultivation contribute to man-made biodiversity in...