INTRODUCTION

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries AD, when the first Europeans ventured into the Amazon, they described the presence of settlements placed along the rivers, sometimes so large that one would have to travel several miles to pass by their full extent. On those settlements, according to the sources, one would find paramount chiefs who commanded vast areas, including other settlements, and were able to mobilize large numbers of warriors. In some places settlements were surrounded by palisades, further evidence that warfare was fairly common at the time. Other chroniclers also speak of the beauty of the pottery, which they compare favorably to the pottery of Malaga (Papavero, Teixeira, Overal and Pujol-Luz 2002; Porro 1993, 1994).

Five hundred years later, much of what we know about the ways of living of the settled societies along the floodplains of the Amazon and its major tributaries still comes from early colonial reports. Thus, much of their pre-colonial history is still marred in speculations: were these powerful chiefdoms that descended from groups that occupied those settings continuously for thousands of years (Carneiro 1995; Lathrap 1970; Roosevelt 1991a)? Or were these reports merely ideological propaganda aimed at securing funds in Europe for other forays in this vast area (Meggers 1993-95)? It will be a while before a coherent picture of the archaeology of the Amazonian floodplain emerges despite a noticeable increase in first-hand archaeological research in the archaeology of the area starting in the early 1990s (Erickson 2000, 2005a, 2005b; Gomes 2002, 2005; Guapindaia

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

Springer, New York, 2008

2001; Heckenberger 2000, 2005; Heckenberger, Petersen and Neves 1999; Heckenberger et al. 2003; Lima, Neves and Petersen 2006; Mora 2003; Neves, Petersen, Bartone and Silva 2003; Neves, Petersen, Bartone and Heckenberger 2004; Petersen, Neves and Heckenberger 2001; Morales 1998; Roosevelt 1991a; Roosevelt et al. 1991, 1996; Roosevelt, Douglas and Brown 2002; Schaan 2001a, 2004).

Evidence accumulated during recent decades shows that the history of human occupation of the Amazon floodplain is more complex than can be subsumed by disputes employing typological, social evolutionary categories such as tribe versus chiefdom. The data also show that the role of environmental forces in the explanation of past human dynamics was perhaps exaggerated by previous scholars, and that social or political variables could have been as important as ecological adaptation in some contexts. Today scholars are achieving a more historical-based, particularistic focus that is needed before further attempts at generalizations can be successful.

This paper intends to examine the available archaeological evidence of the social formations that occupied the Amazonian floodplain from ca. 500 BC to AD 1500. It is based on work done in different South American countries, but it will have a strong focus on the Brazilian Amazon due to the availability of new information for this area, the comparatively larger size of the Amazon basin in Brazil, and the fact that this is my own area of active research. In the Brazilian Amazon, as in other Amazonian countries, the possibility of doing large-scale fieldwork is severely limited by logistical problems such as cost of transport, site visibility, access to Indigenous lands and the increasing danger posed by drug trafficking and guerilla warfare (Oyuela-Caycedo and Bonzani 2005: xviii; Politis 1996). On the other hand, there is a noticeable increase in large-scale regional projects related to contract archaeology, mostly from mining, hydroelectric and pipeline construction, normally in areas located away from the main Amazonian floodplain. Although much of the data remain unpublished, in the few cases that are reported the publications have brought new and insightful information on cultural sequences of poorly known areas (Miller et al. 1992).