Multidisciplinary Approaches to Amazonian landscapes

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.