Pre-Columbian Forest Management in the Ecuadorian Eastern Andes/Upper Amazon: An Anthropological Historical Ecology Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Forest Management and Landscape Transformation: Anthropological Perspectives from the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

We present a trajectory of pre-Columbian forest resource management and socio-political change in the Quijos region, an upper Amazonian/eastern Andean setting in north Ecuador. We evaluate if and how forest resource use changed in association with changing social and population dynamics from the early (1000 BC – 500 AD) to the late (500 – 1600 AD) pre-Columbian occupation, specifically, whether this trajectory was marked by greater specialization or diversification in forest resource. Through a discussion of anthropological research questions, scales of analysis, and methods for better understanding ancient forest resource use, and human-environment relations in general, we illustrate how anthropologically defined spatial and temporal scales of analysis and methods are likely to yield information useful in the context of applying knowledge on ancient forest resource use to modern day land use policies, which is of special relevance in settings where contemporary land use practices differ from those of the past.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Ancient Forest Management and Landscape Transformation: Anthropological Perspectives from the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50892