Urbanism without Cities in Ancient Amazonia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Middle Horizon was a time of political centralization in the Andes. During the same period one sees in the Amazon clear evidence of population growth, settlement nucleation and landscape transformation, as it is attested by the increase in site size, the production of anthropic soils, construction of earthworks and the establishment of road networks. Such pattern varied across the Basin: whereas in the llanos de Mojos one sees the construction of truly monumental architecture, in the Central Amazon and elsewhere settlement occupation span was maybe shorter. These cases show that there was a considerable range of forms of urbanism in the Amazon, none of them associated to the development of the state, but based on a structural alternation between episodes of political centralization and decentralization as an outcome of the operation of kin-based domestic level economic activities based on the management of abundance.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39324.0