Donald Lathrap, the Tropical Forest, and Hemispheric Archaeology

Summary

Donald Lathrap was a visionary anthropologist and archaeologist. His contributions always reflected the "big picture": an understanding that all pre-Columbian culture history was intertwined, and that these connections went back through time to origins in the lowland tropics, or the Tropical Forest. He practiced an archaeology that gave equal weight to iconography and religious thought, and rim sherds and energetics. The most significant issues for Lathrap’s version of American Archaeology, is not an argument over the significance of the Amazon Basin in comparison to the Andes, or as a center for cultural innovation. The legacy of Lathrap is Hemispheric Archaeology, that there are deep cultural-historical connections across the Americas, particularly between the Andes and the Amazon that have explanatory value. The big picture is relevant both for maize farmers in the Mississippi Valley, tuber gardeners in the Pacific Northwest, and raised field builders in the Southwest Amazon. Such hemispheric explanations could be just-so-stories, but correcting for this danger is worth the effort, because as the evidence for earlier developments continues to accumulate, the big picture is getting bigger.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20904