An Archaeology of Hope: How the Past Informs Indigenous Futures in the Southern Amazon’s “Arc of Deforestation"

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Two decades of relentless agropastoral development has reduced the closed tropical forests to small patches in most of northern Mato Grosso, within the so-called “arc of deforestation” along the southern margins of the Amazon’s closed tropical forests. There are larger blocks in two Indigenous areas, but these too are acutely threatened by public health and environmental problems from agropastoral development, such as desiccation, water pollution and fire susceptibility, and changes in diet and health. Many commentators seek technological innovation or political change to curb the destruction, or not, but archaeology suggests that the past may also offer important clues to managing contemporary change. In the Upper Xingu region, over two decades of ethnolinguistic and archaeological documentation have revealed large, densely settled precolumbian populations in the centuries before first European contacts in South America. These societies developed sophisticated systems of land management to support a regional society of 50,000 or more, reduced to 500 people in the mid-twentieth century. Here current problems are considered against this backdrop of deep indigenous history to show how ancestral practices provide “homegrown” solutions to current risks, such as soy, fire, and disease, through robust partnerships with Indigenous populations across the Xingu drainage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Archaeology in the Xingu River Basin: Long-Term Histories, Current Threats, and Future Perspectives

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32776