INTRODUCTION

The productivity of ancient Amazonian food procurement and production economies has received considerable attention for many years by archaeologists interested in the degree of sociopolitical and cultural complexity that can be sustained in the diverse Amazonian habitats (Figure 12.1). Theories on agricultural development also underpin arguments about the nature and implications of large-scale population movements—disa-poras—attached to major proto-linguistic stocks, such as Arawakan-Maipuran, Tupian-Guaranian, and Cariban, among others, that are in turn linked to the spread of major archaeological traditions, such as the Amazonian Polychrome or the “Barrancoid”/Incised Rim traditions. The debates surrounding the issues of when and where new subsistence products and technologies show up in the archaeological record, and how these spread and changed has been a major stimulus in researching the origins and development of agriculture in Amazonia.

Agriculture is hailed as the underlying economic foundation of complex societies in the New World. All pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas depended upon the development of agriculture, and this is as true for Amazonia as it is for the rest of the Americas. Nearly thirty years ago Donald W. Lathrap (1962, 1977; see Piperno and Pearsall 1998), building on Carl Sauer’s (1952) work, strenuously argued that the rise of early agrarian-based Andean formative civilizations could hardly be understood without the significant contribution of food crops first ennobled and cultivated in the greater Amazon basin. And yet, age-old questions still remain and are only partially validated by hard archaeobotanical evidence today. When, how and in what ways did humans become reliant on agriculture in Amazonia? What processes and behaviors can account for the diversity of cultivated landscapes of past, whose scars are still observable in the present-day landscape of Amazonia? What forces and circumstances led to the shift (transition) from food procurement to agriculture-based food

Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell.

Springer, New York, 2008

Figure 12.1. Satellite view of confluence of the Solimoes and Negro rivers at Manaus, central Amazon area. The varzea (floodplain) and igapo (flooded forest) of the whitewater Solimoes River contain higher nutrients than the blackwater Negro River, offering different potentials for agricultural and fishing productivity.

Production, when and how did the many different kinds of agricultural systems develop, and what were the consequences for ancient Amazonian pre-Contact societies?

This chapter focuses on some on selected examples of archaeological evidence that have shed light on the rise of agriculture in Amazonia. Extensive, detailed exegesis on this topic can be consulted in the works of Piperno and Pearsall (1998), Denevan (2001), and Harris (1989, 1991).