Forests of Plenty: Ethnographic and Archaeological Rainforests as Hotspots of Human Activity

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.