The Handbook of South American Archaeology provides a new, continental collection of current archaeological information. Hopefully it will promote more continentally framed thinking and teaching about the past. We also hope that the HSAA helps readers to appreciate the growing importance of archaeology for identity formation in post-colonial nations, bridging the racial and ethnic gaps that characterize most New World countries. Neither the colonial empires nor modern South American nations have good track records in the preservation of archaeological patrimony. While this is changing, if the archaeological record is to be adequately protected from looters and developers, a new level of vigilance and prevention is required. This is going to require international cooperation, and international archaeologists stand ready to work together with South American nationals and institutions to achieve the goal. But they must be invited.
Heritage development—the most effective preservation strategy—requires longterm plans and regional perspectives, which have not been achieved by the modern countries of South America. But as Higueras (Chapter 54, this volume) shows, elsewhere in the world success in heritage programs has usually involved many agencies, private and public, national and international. UNESCO and similar world-wide organizations have been the inspiration behind many successful heritage programs, not just in South America. Again, greater cooperation and more insightful planning, at levels from local to international are required. In the meantime, archaeologists are losing the battle against looters and developers. The prehistoric cultural resources of South America are being destroyed at an ever-increasing rate.
Decades of recent archaeological research all across South America, including some in places extremely remote by modern standards, have produced an immense quantity of new information about continental prehistory. The South American past is full of surprises. Many problems that dominated the research arena a few decades ago now seem passe. The Clovis Barrier has been shattered, and archaeologists are gaining a pretty good idea of when South America, the last continental land mass to be inhabited, was first peopled. The role of Amazonia, and the Lathrap-Meggers controversy, is superseded by historical ecology that has cast out deterministic environmental limitations and demonstrated how
Societal complexity develops without a village farming stage. Humans domesticated local environments, not species of plants and animals.
The appearance of early and precocious political organization and monumental settlements on the north central coast of Peru brings surprising new understandings - and confusions - to the study of South American civilization. Monumental mounds of equal antiquity in Brazil and Uruguay confound traditional ideas about cultural development - as do Chinchorro mummies and Sambaqui shell mounds. These and many other new South American understandings challenge archaeology. Currently popular cultural evolutionism, that defines social evolution as transformational change from one stage of complexity to the next—and limits development to idealized stages in an idealized sequence: “hunting and gathering band,” “autonomous village society,” “rank society,” “chiefdom,” “archaic state,” and “empire”—fails to recognize the variability and complexity apparent in South America’s past. While cultural evolution is the master theory of anthropological archaeology, it requires significant new theorizing. South Americanists will contribute to this theory development, and to corresponding field-based knowledge, as they have in the past. The legacy of the Handbook of South American Indians, and its editor, Julian H. Steward, is a great responsibility.
World History
