Multidisciplinary Approaches to Amazonian landscapes
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)
The symposium will explore the environmental and anthropogenic factors that have created a distinctive Amazonian landscape over the past millennia. Unlike the Andes and Mesoamerica, the Amazon region was long believed to be a pristine land, a place where the environment constrained the formation of complex social formations. However, it is now known that prior to European colonization, larger groups of people with hierarchical socio-political organization and extensive networks of communication inhabited this region. Archaeological and ethnohistorical data demonstrated that the natives in the Amazon actively modified the landscape to meet economic, political and social needs. Thus, this distinctively anthropogenic landscape provides one of the most important database for understanding routinized social practices and their role in historical transformation.
The presentations in this session will discuss theories of landscapes as culturally meaningful places and as products of the interaction between human and non-human entities. Case studies from diverse areas will demonstrate how the study of the Amazon landscape enriched our understanding of past social organization, religious organization, and historical change.
Other Keywords
historical ecology •
Landscape •
Paleoecology •
Gis •
Amazonia •
Amazon •
Ceramics •
Mound •
Remote Sensing •
Archaeology
Geographic Keywords
South America
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-15 of 15)
- Documents (15)
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Amazonian Landscapes: the characteristics of anthropic landscapes in the Middle Xingu River (Pará, Brazil) from pre-colonial to Contemporary times (2016)
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Based on a historical ecology approach, this work aims to investigate interactions between indigenous societies and the natural environment expressed in landscape changes through the analyses of their long term occupation of the Middle Xingu River. My goal is to show the specificities of the indigenous settlements in the region considering the multiple aspects of this process in the human settlement of Amazonia. Although not producing great changes in the landscape, small groups of...
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Amazonian mounds. When Human sciences met Earth sciences (2016)
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Because the subject of the archaeological study disappears nowadays and exists only as traces, it is necessary to diversify the points of view to comprehend the past. The interdisciplinary approach helps to interpret better the human and natural components of the environment. On the basis of two Amazonian cases, from French Guiana and from Ecuador, it will be shown how cooperation between various disciplines improves considerably the interpretation. The first case concerns thousands of small...
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Ancient plant management at ADEs on Santarem region from an archaeobotanical approach (2016)
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ADEs are highly fertile soils found in association with archaeological sites all over the Amazonia that result from ancient societies’ landscape management. We present preliminary results on the research of plant consumption on Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE) sites at Santarem region, Lower Amazon. To tackle questions concerning plant food production and the formation of ADEs at the region three sites are under investigation from an archaeobotanical approach: Serra do Maguari and Cedro on terra...
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Arqueoastronomy and built landscape: the spatial orientation of geometric enclosures in Western Amazonia (2016)
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Geometric enclosures found over a 400 sq. km area in Western Amazonia were built in patterned ways that involved depth, width, and morphology of monumental ditches excavated in a clay soil matrix. Pattern eventually included care for solar orientation. A study of 419 geometric enclosures showed that around 60% of them were clearly oriented according to the sun’s trajectory and its maximum distance from the Ecuador, e.g. the solstice. One of the working hypotheses is that the agricultural...
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Detecting Pre-Columbian Paleoecological Disturbance in the Lower Amazon (2016)
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Amazonia is a major reservoir of biodiversity that has been influenced by anthropogenic activities for millennia. However, the temporal and spatial scale of pre-Columbian land use and its modern legacy on Amazonian landscapes are among the most debated topics in New World archaeology, paleoecology and conservation. This research investigates pre-Columbian (3000-1492 AD) land-use on Amazonian landscapes near the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers, a region once occupied by the capital of...
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Different and complementary landscapes: A case of study in the Flona-Tapajós (2016)
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The goal of this presentation is to contribute to the ongoing debate in Amazonian studies to which human societies impacted and reshaped the landscapes. Landscapes are the results of a human action and environmental changes over time, providing a fundamental dataset for understanding social practices in a historically particular manner (Ingold 1993). Ultimately, this presentation sheds light on the formation and significance of settlement patterns within sites located in the Flona-Tapajós and...
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From Maps to Lives: Participatory Archaeology and the Fate of the Amazon in the Digital Age. (2016)
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The collaborative turn in archaeology has had important impacts on Amazonian research over the past several decades. It uses participatory research strategies and public archaeology to promote inclusive research partnerships. One aspect of collaboration that is still seldom addressed is the use of digital technology in archaeological analysis and dissemination. The Xingu project, which included local digital documentation and video and a long-standing project of archaeological GPS mapping and...
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The geographical distribution of the Amazonian Dark Earths in the Lower Amazon (2016)
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The geographical distribution of the Amazonian Dark Earths (ADE) in the Amazon region presents interpretive gaps. Understanding their distribution patterns might reveal the dynamics of indigenous settlements during pre-colonial times, as well as landscape management practices, and chronology. In the Upper Xingu, the distribution of ADE indicates that the smaller satellite villages were interconnected by roads to a larger village center. Santarém and Belterra regions, in the Lower Amazon, ADE...
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Historical ecology of landscape transformations and ceramic industries at the site of Cedro (Lower Tapajós) from pre-colonial to colonial times. (2016)
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The presence of demographically dense indigenous societies in the Lower Tapajós River during AD 900-1600 is visible in the present day’s landscape through the existence of Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE), earthworks, and a distinctive ceramic industry. As demonstrated by recent archaeological surveys, landscape transformations and ceramic assemblages associated to the Tapajó chiefdom are widespread at the regional scale and attest to common cultural practices. Although these archaeological sites are...
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Historical Ecology: Archaeology for a Sustainable Future (2016)
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Historical Ecology is a research program that seeks to integrate diverse perspectives from human and natural sciences to improve our understanding on the relations between societies and their changing landscapes. Investigations in historical ecology draw from different corpus of data, including the participation of the public, not only to solve scientific problems, but also to provide answers to social and political situations. Archaeology has a major role in the production of knowledge on the...
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A multiproxy approach to study past human impact on the Lower Amazon, Santarem (2016)
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This presentation summarises the preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research carried out in the context of the ‘Pre-Columbian Amazon-Scale Transformation’ project that investigate the nature and scale of past human impact across the Amazon integrating archaeology, archaeobotany, palaeoecology, soil science, botany and remote sensing. We present initial results from the unique region around Santarém city at the confluence of the Tapajós and the Amazon rivers, home to the Tapajós...
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Predicting the past: Remote sensing data as a tool for locating archaeological settlements in the Amazon (2016)
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The potentials of using analysis of remote sensing data (particularly Lidar data) as a method of predicting the presence of archaeological sites in densely forested areas are discussed in this paper. The case study deals with an inland area — the Belterra Plateau — situated south of Santarém in the State of Pará, Brazil. Recent fieldwork has suggested that late pre-Columbian settlements generally are found in the surroundings particular geological features and in this region. Drawing on the...
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Remote and proximal sensors for field mapping of Amazonian Dark Earths (2016)
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Brazilian and Swedish archaeologists and soil scientists collaborated in the multidisciplinary research project Cultivated Wilderness (CW) to investigate Amazonian Dark Earth (ADE) locations in the Santarém‐Belterra region of the Brazilian Amazon. One of the goals of the project was to investigate the potential of rapid geophysical data collection to assess the properties and spatial distribution of ADE. About 300 reference soil samples were collected at different ADE locations. A range of...
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Where does the Amazon end? (2016)
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Manuals of American prehistory, divided South America into bio geographical zones, associated with archaeological traditions, and classify the basin of the Río de la Plata, as one marginal area of others with a more defined cultural profile. Systematic research and multidisciplinary projects, have discussed the boundaries of those units of archaeological and cultural analysis, as well as theoretical principles which held it. The basin of the Río de la Plata was associated with the "Pampa"...
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Where was the forest in the Upper and Norwest Amazon before the arrival of the Europeans? (2016)
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This paper presents evidence that suggests a very different environment than the observed landscape tropical forest of today. A comparison of two regions, the white waters system of the upper Amazon river (region of Iquitos, Peru) and the black water system of the Mesay river drainage (Chiribiquete National Park, Colombia), illustrates the strong possibility that these areas were grasslands in the past. This is considered to be a byproduct of (consider using anthopogenic activities) human action...