Digging a Forgotten Archeological Sequence in Amazonia: 19th Century to Mid-20th Century and Beyond.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

19th century natural scientists interested in Amazon archaeology saw the region as having a long prehistoric sequence of early hunters, sedentary ceramic fisherpeople, farmers, and complex societies. Both South American scientists and institutions invited European and North Americans to join research in the region. But by c. 1950, the first professional archaeologists coming in from North America had concluded that the rainforest had limited the entry of humans until migrants from Andean agricultural civilizations invaded in late prehistory. The advanced cultures of the migrants were assumed to have soon devolved to shifting villages in the hot, humid, hostile environment. The mid-20th-century scholars actively engaged South Americans in their research, and other foreign teams came to work there with time. But in contrast to assumptions about a hostile environment, these other archaeologists found evidence of both terminal Pleistocene hunting-gathering cultures and the eventual development of agriculture, complex cultures, and large, dense settlements in the Holocene. This paper reviews how research with different theoretical approaches and technical advances in dating, bioarchaeology, and geoarchaeology in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s transformed the picture of human prehistory in the Amazon to a sequence similar to but not identical, to 19th century notions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Digging through the Decades: A 90-year Retrospective on American Archaeology; Biennial Gordon Willey Session in the History of Archaeology

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51208