Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session brings together researchers working in different portions of the Xingu River basin, a primary tributary of the Amazon. Recent archaeological and anthropological research reveal a complex and diverse cultural and environmental history extending from late Pleistocene to contemporary Indigenous, Maroon (*quilombola) and riverine (*ribeirinhos) occupations. The session focuses on core areas of the basin, the “Xingu corridor,” which forms one of the largest protected areas of tropical biocultural diversity in the world. It highlights how Indigenous and traditional communities and practices have created complex anthropogenic landscapes over the millennia and have significant implications for conservation and sustainability in the region today. Current pressures include a spike in deforestation in the southern Amazon’s “arc of deforestation,” which threatens local communities, biodiversity, and the functional integrity of regional ecosystems. The session considers the Xingu basin as a meso-scale area of analysis in Amazonia, a level of analysis generally lacking from regional studies, which tend to focus on minimal sampling in small plots or macroscopic remote sensing analyses to the expense of in-depth contextualized studies. Such in-depth studies, by necessity conducted in partnership with local communities, are precisely what is needed for archaeology to be relevant cultural heritage rights and sustainability.