The Search for Places in Southwestern Archaeology: Ancient Landscape Building in the Madeira and Purus Basins and Long-Term Indigenous History

Summary

Mounds, ditches, roads and other kinds of earthworks are found in ever larger quantities in southwestern amazon archaeology. An increase in the quantity and quality of research carried out in this area and the more detailed data that was recently made available have changed our understanding of the kind and degree of human interaction with the environment. Today, archaeological landscape building in this region can be explored in a more regionally detailed framework, since the knowledge produced about the western part of the Purus and Madeira river basins is now able to interface with studies carried out in the Brazilian Amazon Basin over the last two decades.

Almost all of the earliest human occupations found in the Amazon Basin have some relationship with places physically constructed in the past. The horizon of the mid-Holocene moundbuilders appears to be spread over an area larger than Japan, and its relations with later modifications of the landscape are beginning to be investigated. This symposium intends to offer an opportunity of exchange for researchers that have been acting in the southwestern amazon and beyond, with the purpose of improving the construction of the regional archaeological scenario.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage