Variety of Rain Forest Subsistence Strategies. A Comparative Overview

Summary

A large scale comparative research project on the state of the peoples living in the Rain Forests of Central Africa, the Guyana’s in South America and in Melanesia, has highlighted the anthropic character of tropical rain forests. It has particularly underlined the strong correlation between biodiversity and cultural diversity and how domesticated and wild resources interact in the various subsistence systems. Activities associated with shifting cultivation contribute to man-made biodiversity in significant ways. Agrobiodiversity, as well as the use of space and the extent to which tropical forest people have varied in their mobility, all deserve more attention by archeologists. Territoriality is determined by resource distribution as much as by social organization. The different kinds of local knowledge and practice are always embedded in a cultural context and are socially distributed. The extent of the knowledge of the various timber and non-timber forest products and their possible use is telling. All of the above represents the challenge that we must face in attempting to reconstruct the past of those populations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Forests of Plenty: Ethnographic and Archaeological Rainforests as Hotspots of Human Activity

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