The methodology of research in Amazonia has had a trajectory somewhat comparable to that of North American archaeology. It begins with an early prescientific period of free-ranging observation and inference. Then comes an early scientific period of theoretical writing whose research is not explicitly oriented to theoretical problems. There is a final period of field research with explicit problem-oriented design and an expansion of research for cultural resource managment. In each period, however, there are many researchers who do not fit into the trajectory.
During the prescientific period, scholars working in Amazonia noted a diversity of archaeological sites and materials but did not use systematic research methods or relate their findings to general theories. However, their important, open-minded empirical observations were the basis of an eventual rethinking of early modern scientific theory by scholars of the first phase of scientific interpretation and the subsequent period of problem oriented research. For example, Charles Hartt, Alfred Russel Wallace, and H. H. Smith, and Joao Barbosa Rodrigues were all aware of preceramic sites and rockpaintings. Domingos Soares Ferreira Penna, Joseph Steere, and Hartt all recognized that there had been early pottery cultures subsisting on fishing, rather than agriculture; and Ladislav Netto, Orville Derby, and Hartt all recognized that there had been populous indigenous prehistoric complex cultures with high art, urban-like centers, and extensive earthworks.
In the subsequent early scientific period, work by the Smithsonian group and their affiliates as well as by Lathrap and his associates (c. 1948 through 1975) focused mainly on excavating and descriptively analyzing pottery styles to define archaeological cultures, despite the fact that the New Archaeology had developed a quiver of refined archaeological methods and systematic measurement techniques. The narrow research interests of the early scientific archaeologists in Amazonia prevented them from exploiting the theoretical implications of prescientific researchers’ observations and interpretations. Thus, neither the Smithsonian group nor Lathrap’s group realized at that time that there had been Palaeoindian cultures and early Pottery Archaic cultures in Amazonia. When the Smithsonian Institution began producing radiocarbon dates, the dates definitely contradicted their presumption of late human arrival and prehistoric cultural deterioration. But the institution’s scholars found it impossible to integrate the early dates into their short chronology of the human occupation. Lathrap’s group, although aware of some of the early dates, nonetheless concentrated on late prehistory. So it was that only in the 1980s and 1990s were new groups of archaeologists able to establish the outlines of a long archaeological sequence by discovering new cultural phases with stratigraphic excavation techniques and intensive dating of multicomponent sites. Only then, too, were sites systematically instrument-mapped, allowing community analysis for the first time.
The archaeologists who created this longer sequence were inspired by the US New Archaeology (or processual archaeology) movement of the 1960s and 1970s to broaden data gathering with techniques from archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, and human osteology and to sharpen analysis by the application of accelerator dating, geoarchaeology, geochemistry, computerized topographic mapping, informatics, and statistical analysis. It was this quiver of techniques that revealed the types of settlements and subsistence technologies not envisioned by the environmental determinists. By the 1980s, critical theory archaeologists opposed to processual archaeology had raised questions about the organizational mode and economic base of complex societies, and in Amazonia, these questions stimulated the use of methods that could better define prehistoric organization and economy. Within-site settlement subsurface mapping, regional settlement surveys, subsistence analysis, and cemetery analysis all have been recruited to test hypotheses. Of special theoretical significance have been the complex site plans and corpus of dated and biological remains that archaeologists have recovered in stratigraphic context with the new data gathering techniques. Aggregate information from pollen, macroscopic biological remains, as well as skeletal analyses has allowed more informed inferences about change in environment, subsistence, socioeconomic differentiation, and health patterns. Osteological techniques pioneered in the New Archaeology period have showed in the Amazonian populations a persistence of robust good health through prehistory, with a decline only in postconquest times. This sequence of data, along with the settlement data, did not support the idea that the Amazon lacked sufficient subsistence resources for prehistoric populations.
Not all Amazonian researchers buy into the idea of problem-oriented research or operationalized field methods. Many do not use the methods of data collection and analysis popularized by the New Archaeologists, and many do not subject their theoretical arguments to empirical tests. For example, some researchers argue for particular chronologies but do not carry out systematic radiometric dating and statistical analysis to make their case. Some researchers define land-use areas without justifying them with remote images or empirical soil classifications. Others make claims about ancient subsistence but do not feel the need to test them with fine-screening, quantified biological identifications, or stable isotope analysis for palaeodietary information. Others making claims about settlement patterns do not make instrument maps of sites to justify their arguments. Researchers on rock art do not use photogrammetric or laser mapping to record images precisely nor chemical analyses to trace pigments.
World History
