Betty J. Meggers has been working in Amazonian archaeology
for more than 50 years. She has recently published a review of the Handbook of
South American Archaeology, which is of great relevance to all of us working on
the paleoecology of Amazonia during the Holocene. You can download her paper
here.
The paper discusses 3 fundamental aspects of the South
American archaeology: i) how contemporary Amazonian archaeologists’ interpretation
of the archaeological record has been biased by the abandonment of the
classical archaeological methods of pottery analysis; ii) the origin of new
world pottery and iii) the relationship between environmental conditions and
cultural development in Amazonia.
Classical archaeologists spent months on end drawing and
analysing thousands of pieces of pottery. In the first part of her paper,
Meggers explains why this meticulous work is a fundamental step in scientific
archaeology: “Pottery can be decorated using an essentially unlimited number of
techniques and motifs without affecting the utility of the vessel, making
independent duplication of identical decoration unlikely”. Therefore, the
analysis of pottery’s details and decorations allows us to distinguish
diffusion (cultural aspects which are transmitted form one cultural group to
another) form independent invention, where a cultural trait arises
spontaneously in a given population. According to Meggers, some of the authors
of the Handbook omit this important task, undermining the strength of their
interpretation of archaeological records
Pottery analysis is the criteria that Meggers uses to
discuss, in the second part of her paper, the origin of new world pottery. Many
archaeologists that have contributed to the Handbook believe that pottery was
independently invented in Amazonia. In Meggers’ view, the similitudes between
Japanese Jomon pottery and the Valdivia pottery (which is the oldest pottery in
America, dating 6000 BP) are too many to be the result of some form of
“cultural convergence”. Moreover, she highlights that the period of Valdivia
pottery coincides with a catastrophic volcanic eruption in Japan, which could
have pushed groups of Japanese fishermen towards the American coasts. Hence,
these Japanese fishermen would have influenced the pottery of early Americans. .
In the Handbook, Amazonia is depicted as a “manufactured
landscape” or “anthropogenic cornucopia”. In the third part of her paper, Meggers
assesses whether or not such descriptions of Amazonia are supported by the
archaeological evidence. She shows that the evidence is actually very weak: the
idea of widespread human occupation of pre-Columbian Amazonia is not supported
by pollen, phytolith and charcoal analysis, which indicate that vast areas of
Amazonia have never faced human disturbance; no systematic archaeological
excavation has ever been performed that supports the assumption that large
permanent settlements were common in Amazonia; many of the earthworks often
cited in support of the “manufactured landscape” idea are concentrated in the
Llanos de Moxos, which are ecologically quite different from the tropical
rainforest that covers most of the Amazon basin; there is no evidence
suggesting that ADE was created for intensive agriculture or to exclude that
slash and burn agriculture was a common practice among pre-Columbian people.
Despite the fact that the bibliography of Meggers’ paper is not
as large as it could have been, it can still serve as a good introduction to
the archaeology of Amazonia for anyone who wants to get into the heart of the current
debates.
