INTRODUCTION

When one thinks of Amazonia, images of large towering trees, dark and humid forests, brightly colored frogs, and smiling native people decorated in paint and feathers come to mind. In addition to engaging public awareness, these popular images are used to raise funds for conservation, to advance green politics, and to promote cultural and ecotourism. They are updated versions of nineteenth century imagery common in travel books and explorers’ accounts of Amazonia as a Green Hell or as the Garden of Eden. Surprisingly, many colleagues in the natural sciences and conservation still hold similar notions about Amazonia. These romantic views of nature are contrasted to the reality of contemporary humans destroying the ecosystems of Amazonia through modern development. Loss of biodiversity, extinction of species, deforestation, erosion, pollution, and global warming are attributed to humans and their activities. Recent studies argue that humans have been involved in environmental degradation, ecological catastrophe, and global change throughout their existence.

Traditional historical, geographical, anthropological, and archaeological perspectives on native Amazonia share these negative views. In the classic literature, past and present Amazonian cultures are considered to have been determined largely by the environment to which they adapted. What appears to be a lush, bountiful setting for human development is actually a counterfeit paradise according to some scholars (e. g., Meggers 1971). Environmental limitations, such as poor soils and a lack of protein, combined with a limited technology, few domestic animals, and abundant unoccupied land restricted social development. The simple societies of Amazonia did not evolve into what we recognize as civilization. In this traditional view, the environment is an immutable given or a fixed entity to which human societies adapt (or do not, and thus, fail, and disappear). The basic assumption is that poor environments produce simple societies (band societies of hunters, gatherers, and fishers or

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

Springer, New York, 2008

Tribal societies of subsistence farmers) and the corollary, that rich environments produce complex societies (chiefly and state societies of urban and rural folk).

Historical ecology provides a radical, alternative perspective for understanding human-environment interaction over the long term and the complex human histories of environments. Historical ecology focuses on landscape as the medium created by human agents through their interaction with the environment. Although landscapes can be the result of unintentional activities, historical ecologists focus on the intentional actions of people and the logic of indigenous knowledge, particularly the understanding of resource creation and management. Historical ecologists, borrowing from the new ecology, argue that disturbance caused by human activities is a key factor in shaping biodiversity and environmental health. Because much of human-environmental history extends beyond written records, the archaeology of landscapes plays an important role. Through the physical signatures or footprints of human activities, technology, engineering, and knowledge embedded in the landscape, historical ecologists have a historical perspective of over 11,000 years about human-environment interaction in Amazonia.

What Amazonian people did to their environment was a form of domestication of landscape (Erickson 2006). Domestication of landscape implies all intentional and non-intentional practices and activities of humans that transform the environment into a productive landscape for humans and other species. Domesticated landscapes are the result of careful resource creation and management with implications for the diversity, distribution, and availability of species. Through their long-term historical transformation of the environment involving transplanting of plants and animals, selective culling of non-economic species and encouragement of useful species, burning, settlement, farming, agroforestry (forest management), and other activities discussed in this paper, humans created what we recognize and appreciate as nature in Amazonia. Through the perspective of historical ecology, however, we see that nature in Amazonia more closely resembles a garden than a pristine, natural wilderness. Rather than “adapt to” or be “limited by” the Amazonian environment, humans created, transformed, and managed cultural or anthropogenic (human-made) landscapes that suited their purposes. The cultural or anthropogenic landscapes range from the subtle (often confused with “natural” or “pristine”) to completely engineered.

In this chapter, I introduce historical ecology, new ecology, landscape, and domestication of landscape as key concepts for understanding complex, long term interactions between humans and the environment. I show how historical ecology challenges traditional assumptions and myths about Amazonia. Later, I survey examples of human activities that have created, transformed, and managed environments and their association to biodiversity.

In this chapter, I use the term Amazonia to refer to the Amazon basin (the entire region drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries) and more loosely to refer to the tropical lowlands of South America or Greater Amazonia (cf. Lathrap 1970; Denevan 2001). As an anthropogenic environment and interacting culture area of considerable time depth, Amazonia is tied to the neotropics or tropical regions of the Americas.