Cultural area studies are sure to continue growing in the future, focusing and specializing as scholarship advances, but it must be remembered that the ancient native people of South America experienced more than just their own culture area. They participated in continental processes of cultural adaptation, domestication, migration, and interactive culture change, making it especially important to embrace a continental perspective. South America was more isolated and independent than any other continent except Australia, and it was certainly the most isolated continent to achieve intermediate range and complex societies through wholly autochthonous processes. While there will always be questions about cultural diffusion from other areas - such as documented by occasional interchanges with Mesoamerica (Hosler 1996; Marcos 1995), there can be no question that the emergence of social inequality, political hierarchy, civilization and empire in South America was an exclusively South American process. South American societies developed their cultural potentials within the continent - including such distinctive structural configurations as dual organization shared continentally, from “marginal tribes” in the East Brazilian highlands to “civilized” Incas of the Central Andes. One clear proof of South America’s independence is the khipu, a unique solution for information recording (Urton, this volume). All forms of writing in early civilizations shared certain characteristics (Trigger 2003), except the South American khipu, which was entirely innovative, distinguishing South America’s achievement of civilization from processes in the rest of the world.
At first glance South America appears to be a continent of such extremes that one might suspect concomitant areal isolation. But such is not the case. Long-distance contact and population movement is part of the prehistory of the continent from earliest peopling into the latest pre-Hispanic period. South America is uniquely equatorial. The continent clusters around the largest tropical forest region in the world, containing the greatest natural waterway of the globe. The immense Andean cordillera actually creates a remarkable high
Elevation pastoral corridor, facilitating north-south movements by hunters, pastoralists, and armies whose quartermaster depended on llama caravans. A small number of language families were widely dispersed, demonstrating shared cultural heritage extending into the remote past, while South Americans continued carrying out remarkable expansions up to the moment of European invasion - expansive cultures as different as the Caribs, Arawaks, Tupi, Wari, and Incas. There is no culture in South America that did not participate in uniquely South American heritage and experience, sharing the environment, ancient cultural patterns, and communities of neighbors.
World History
