Indigenous Land Use and Cultural Burning in the Amazon Rainforest Ecotone

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The southwestern Amazon Rainforest Ecotone is the transitional landscape between the tropical forest and seasonally flooded savannahs of the Bolivian Llanos de Moxos. These heterogeneous landscapes harbor high levels of biodiversity and some of the earliest records of human occupation and plant domestication in Amazonia. While persistent Indigenous legacies have been demonstrated elsewhere in the Amazon, it is unclear how past human–environment interactions may have shaped agroecosystems in the ARE. Here, we examine 6,000 years of archaeological and paleoecological data from Laguna Versalles (LV) and Laguna Ignacito (LI), Bolivia. Both LV and LI were dominated by stable rainforest vegetation throughout the Holocene. Maize cultivation and cultural burning are present after ca.5700 cal yr BP. Polyculture cultivation of maize, manioc, and leren after ca. 3400 cal yr BP predates the formation of Amazonian Dark/Brown Earth (ADE/ABE) soils (approx. 2400 cal yr BP). ADE/ABE formation is associated with agroforestry indicated by increased edible palms, including Mauritia flexuosa and Attalea sp., and record levels of burning, suggesting that fire played an important role in agroforestry practices. The frequent use of fire altered ADE/ABD forest composition and structure by controlling ignitions, decreasing fuel loads, and increasing the abundance of plants preferred by humans.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Subsistence Crops and Animals as a Proxy for Human Cultural Practice   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37643.0