Understanding the extent to which
pre-Columbian peoples altered and deforested the Amazon basin is key in order
to assess i) the impact that pre-Columbians had on global climate during the
Holocene [Dull et al., 2010] and ii) the resilience of the Amazon rainforest
to human disturbance [Bush and Silman, 2007]. The first point is
essential to our understanding of the major drivers behind climate fluctuations
during the Holocene, and hence to help predict future fluctuations. The second
point is important to inform conservation and development policies in Amazonia.
Unfortunately, the scarcity of archaeological and paleoecological data from the
Amazon Basin has favoured the proliferation of “reconstructions of the past”
that are hard to test. Some of these theories have reached broad
audiences thanks to the echo provided by popular media and
books [Mann, 2005]. New archaeological findings that suggest the
existence of complex societies in pre-Columbian Amazonia have led some
researchers to define the Amazon Basin as a “manufactured landscape” or an
“anthropogenic cornucopia” [Balée and Erickson, 2006; Erickson,
2008]. There are 3 different lines of research that can help assess
whether or not these reconstructions are accurate. One is to focus on those
regions that host important archaeological remains and study the evidence of
complex societies. This work is already being carried out by some
archaeologists such as Heiko Prümers.
The second area of research is to examine if and how the
development of complex societies in the region were influenced by local
environmental constraints and opportunities. This is the kind of work that I am
carrying out in the Llanos de Moxos and hope to discuss in another post
quite soon J (briefly
introduced here…). Another area of research that can help us
understand the Amazon’s past is to test if the level of human disturbance
associated with the sites where evidence of complex societies has been
discovered can be extrapolated to the rest of the Amazon basin. A
milestone paper that looks at the latter, and that has been
often cited in this blog, is Bush and Silman (2007).
A few weeks ago, The Holocene published on-line a new paper that delves
deep into this question, providing interesting new data [McMichael et al.,
2011]. McMichael et al. test the hypothesis that human disturbance was
widespread in the Amazon Basin during pre-Columbian times (as some authors have
suggested). If this hypothesis is true and the disturbance was widespread then,
the authors argue, the sites where permanent settlements were likely to have
established should show sedimentary evidence of that disturbance. Hence, they
cored lakes (considered by the authors as preferred settlement sites) and
sampled soils in the vicinity of the lakes and looked at charcoal and
phytoliths. They found that charcoal record was discontinuous and localized.
They then concluded, based on the sedimentary evidence: “Our data suggest that
while all of the settings examined were occupied or used, the halo of influence
around each was limited. It should not be assumed that intensive landscape
transformations by prehistoric human populations occurred throughout Amazonia
or that Amazonian forests were resilient in the face of heavy historical
disturbance”. The paper suggests that pre-Columbians developed into complex
societies and substantially altered their environment in those areas where
environmental conditions were favourable. They predict that these sites can be
found along the main rivers and in those parts of the Amazon Basin that are
characterized by a strong seasonality (like the Llanos de Moxos).
In my opinion this paper is a
beautiful piece of Science and I invite you to read it!
References:
Balée,
W., and C. L. Erickson (2006), Time, complexity and historical ecology, in Time and complexity in historical ecology:
studies in the neotropical lowlands, edited by W. Balée and C. L. Erickson,
pp. 1-17, Columbia University Press, New York.
Bush,
M. B., and M. R. Silman (2007), Amazonian exploitation revisited: ecological
asymmetry and the policy pendulum, Frontiers
in Ecology and the Environment, 5(9),
457-465.
Dull,
R. A., R. J. Nevle, W. I. Woods, D. K. Bird, S. Avnery, and W. M. Denevan
(2010), The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change,
Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing, Annals of
the Association of American Geographers, 100(4), 755-771.
Erickson,
C. L. (2008), Amazonia: the historical ecology of a domesticated landscape, in Handbook of South American archaeology,
edited by H. Silverman and W. H. Isbell, pp. 157-183, Springer, Berlin.
Mann,
C. C. (2005), 1491 New revelations of the
Americans before Columbus, Vintage books, New York.
No comments:
Post a Comment