In the period from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century, researchers mainly from natural science fields and cultural studies took great interest in the archaeology of the Amazon. They traveled widely, made astute observations, carried out excavations, reached insightful interpretations, and published extensively. However, their use of theory was unexplicit and their data gathering and analysis unsystematic. Their work was ignored until the late twentieth century, when it became the basis for a critical review of theories and a new stage of problem-oriented field research.
The early natural science researchers described a wide range of materials in sites, including diverse biological remains, and already recognized most of the cultures now accepted by archaeologists at the time of this writing. Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Hartt published on the rock paintings at Monte Alegre; J. Barbosa Rodrigues, Hartt, and H. H. Smith noted the existence of projectile points in the Taperinha-Monte Alegre area. Domingos Soares Ferreira Penna and his invitees, Hartt and Joseph Steere, reported on research at early pottery shell-mounds at Taperinha, the mouth of the Amazon, and elsewhere. Hartt’s research team excavated on Marajo Island, at Taperinha near Santarem, and at Monte Alegre in Para. Ladislav Netto published an ambitious analysis of iconography and social organization at the Marajoara culture. Curt Nimuendaju surveyed and collected extensively, documenting the incised and punctate pottery horizon near Santarem and ceramic and standing stone sites just north of the mouth of the Amazon. He also ventured a still-influential reconstruction of the ethnohistoric Tapajo society of Santarem, which he associated with the Santarem archaeological pottery culture. Unfortunately, important early reports were published in Portuguese and stayed generally unknown to North Americans, but erudite scholars such as Helen Constance Palmatery disseminated important excerpts in their own English syntheses on Amazon archaeology.
Also writing in English, Erland Nordenskiold synthesized lowland South American archaeology and ethnology in comparative schemas, pioneered research at lowland mound sites in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia, and inspired many others to work in the area. The materials collected by them from that area have mostly lain unpublished in European museums. The Peruvian and Columbian Amazon regions have less recorded work from this period.
By the end of World War II, scientific archaeology had become established as a discipline, and government funding for foreign area studies supported archaeological research abroad. As mentioned above, in Amazonia, the early scientitific archaeologists of the postwar period focused on the definition and analysis of pottery cultures. Despite their theorizing on the history of human adaptation to Amazonia, they did not do systematic empirical research on settlement pattern, chronology, or human ecology.
Meggers and Evans wrote their dissertations on their mid-twentieth century research on archaeological sequences at the mouth of the Amazon in Brazil. Their theory about the invasion and deterioration of Andean cultures was framed before radiocarbon dating. In the late 1950s they expanded research to British Guiana and in the 1960s to Venezuelan Guyana. Meggers and Evans then worked in the Napo River valley of the Ecuadorian Amazon, finding a local sequence that only later was understood to demonstrate a sequence contrary to their theory of the colonization of the Amazon. Their proteges in Brazil, British Guiana, and Uruguay carried on their effort by identifying cultures at many new sites in Amazon. The new cultural phases they found in eastern Amazonia included presumptive Formative and Archaic cultures, which by definition embodied a longer human occupation in the Amazon than their theories allowed for. In addition, dates from their excavations on Marajo suggested that the Polychrome horizon was older in Amazonia than in the Andes and that some mound constructions there dated back to Formative times. However, Meggers and Evans expressed doubts about those dates and argued against the idea that there had been early ceramic fishing cultures and early preceramic cultures.
Lathrap wrote his dissertation on his late 1950s excavations at sites in the vicinity of Pucallpa in the
Ucayali River valley of the Peruvian Amazon. He argued, despite very incomplete dating, that these showed an indigenous cultural development, rather than foreign invasions and collapse. His PhD students at the University of Illinois, Urbana, added to his data by focusing on specific cultures. Together, they pushed the beginnings of the Upper Amazon sequence back into the first 1000 years before Christ, and they documented the existence of complex, populous societies at least by the time of the first European accounts. Although the Smithsonian group limited access to dig permits in the Brazilian Amazon, Lathrap students were able to use Brazilian museum collections and archives on the Marajoara culture to document that the area had a richer resource base and longer indigenous sequence than Meggers and Evans had hypothesized.
Numerous Brazilian researchers of the later twentieth century carried out regionally focused research for museums, universities, and public archaeology contracts. In advance of the Carajas region iron-mining development, a team led by Marcos Magalhaes of the Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi excavated caves and rockshelters and defined and dated new Early Archaic and Late Formative cultures at Gruta do Gaviao and other sites. Archaic zooarchaeological finds from Gaviao were analyzed for subsistence information by Mara Imazio da Silveira. In the lower Tapajos River area, Denise Cavalcante Gomes excavated late Formative period sites for her dissertation. On Marajo Island, an interdisciplinary team from the Museu Goeldi did geophysical survey and test excavation at several sites. Their research, though illuminating for methodology and culture history, was not explicitly problem-oriented. Edith Pereira, also of the Goeldi, conducted intensive long-term research and publication on the rock art of Para, a necessary first step allowing for interpretive analysis in the future. Researchers Vera Guapindaia at the Museu Goeldi and Denise Caval-cante Gomes at the University of Sao Paulo have systematically analyzed the technology and style of pottery from Santarem in museums.
At the same time North American archaeologists and Brazilians began long-term problem-oriented research inspired by processual archaeology concepts and methods. Roosevelt’s team conducted long-term research on the history of cultures and habitats in the Lower Amazon. They used detailed instrument mapping, geophysical survey, extensive stratigraphic excavations, and exhaustive soil processing to test theories on the history of human adaptation in Amazonia. Their research sites include Santarem, Taperinha, Monte Alegre, Marajo Island, and the Curua River. A major focus of that research has been dating and analysis of biological remains and artifacts in stratigraphic context. To augment excavation data,
The team also sampled, dated, and chemically analyzed biological collections in museums.
Renato Kipnes has excavated and synthesized information from Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene sites throughout the southern Amazon and southeastern Brazil. Delores Piperno, with collaborators including Deborah Pearsall, has analyzed sediment cores from water bodies in Ecuador and Brazil to collect microfossils for data on subsistence and environmental change. In aid of transportation planning, Brazilian Denise Schaan then of the University of Pittsburgh headed a team that carried out the first extensive regional surveys, geophysical mapping, and test excavations on Marajo at the mouth of the Amazon. Her dissertation assessed the sociopolitical organization of the Marajoara culture as a possible complex chiefdom. Also in the lower Amazon, Vera Guapindaia has researched open sites and cave urn-burial cemeteries of the late prehistoric Maraca culture. Her inventories reveal that the famous burial urns depicting humans seated on effigy stools include men and women in equal numbers. Dirse Kern has led teams that systematically investigated the chemistry of anthropogenic ‘black Indian soils’ for the first time. In the upper Xingu, Eduardo Neves of the University of Sao Paulo and Michael Heckenberger now of the University of Florida investigated the settlement pattern of a cluster of large, late prehistoric ‘round’ village sites, as units of a possible complex chief-dom. The team also has carried out preliminary test-excavation and site survey at terra firme sites near extensive varzea at the mouth of the Rio Negro, looking at the nature and production of the black Indian soils as elements of prehistoric land management.
In the upper Amazon, several Peruvian researchers, including Monica Teixeira, mapped and test-excavated architectural, funerary, and habitation sites along the Andean slopes of the Amazon drainage. In Bolivia, Clark Erickson established a long-term research on agricultural earthworks and habitation sites of the Llanos de Mojos. European researchers have worked both on the history of Inca contact in Andean slopes of the Bolivian Amazon and also on large enigmatic earthworks in the Bolivian Llanos. In Ecuador, researchers led by Ernesto Salazar have mapped and test-excavated numerous diverse mounds in the rich archaeological zone of the Faldas de Sangay area, studied earlier by Pedro Porras, a collaborator of Betty Meggers.
World History
