Pre-Columbian Agro-forestry, Production Cycles and Forest-to-forest Conversion in Southern Amazon Garden Cities

Summary

This paper considers landscape domestication in the Upper Xingu region in the southern Amazonian transitional forests of Brazil. Archaeological research provides detailed information on major late Pre-Columbian settlements, ca. 1000-500 BP, within an environmental history to >30,000 BP and cultural history extending over the past two millennia. Late Pre-Columbian agricultural systems involved forest farming and agro-forestry, including forest conversion within patchy, mosaic forests, including garden plots, grass fields, orchards and successional forest rather than in clear-cutting in long-standing field areas. These high productivity systems maintained high biodiversity of tree species, including industrial plants managed in forest and wetland settings. Specific hypotheses consider alternative agro-forestry systems within long-term sustainable cycles emerging from a Garden City model of a multi-centric urbanism. These results are considered with respect to current debate on the composition of Amazonian forests and sustainable contemporary land-use, as well as indigenous cultural heritage and land rights.

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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