Scales and visibility of human-environment interactions in western Amazonia: the case of the geoglyph builders

Summary

A debate that has received much attention in recent years is the nature and scale of pre-Columbian impact in the Amazon lowlands. While the notion that Amazonia is a "pristine wilderness" has long been rejected, several papers have proposed that human impact in western regions was more sporadic and on a smaller scale than impacts in central and eastern regions, and that western Amazonia supported sparse pre-Columbian populations.

The discovery of over 400 geometrically-patterned earthworks in Acre (western Brazilian Amazon), which until recently lay under in-tact tropical forest, has raised important questions about the kind of societies that built them and their impact on the terra firme, and offers an ideal case study to test this hypothesis.

This paper presents results from the first investigations into human-environment interactions in the geoglyph region, and offers insights into the mechanisms and spatial and temporal scales of landscape transformations associated with the earthwork-building cultures. The data call for a re-appraisal of what we mean by "scales" of human impact in Amazonia, and propose that an understanding of the diversity of human-environment interactions must be considered through studies that closely combine archaeological and palaeoecological proxies.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• From pollen to pottery: new insights on the interplay of society and environment in South America during the last 2000 years

Keywords

Spatial Coverage