Lifetimes of human occupations in Amazonia: rethinking the human presence and landscape transformations

Abstract

Following the approach of Historical Ecologists this presentation will use data from different collaborative projects in order to demonstrate that today's Amazon forest, considered by many as one of the few pristine and unchanged wild environments of the planet, is in fact the result of a long term human management of positive impacts. This assumption is extremely important to rethink the role of traditional populations for the preservation of the Amazon. Scientific standard view presents Amazonia as a place where local societies were unable to reach a fully developed stage as a result of a supposed shortage of resources and an oppressive environment. In this perspective, humans would not have been able to domesticate animals and plants of significant importance to their daily diet. Therefore, forest groups would have lived in continuous dependency and limited by the availability of wild game and plant resources in nature. With the better understanding and accumulation of data provided by Amazonian archaeological sites and remains, nowadays it is possible to offer an alternative viewpoint to understand the long relationship thread between humans and their environment. Different from the first assumptions presented in archaeological studies from the 1950's to the 1990's, we suggest that Amazonian people developed mechanisms of manipulation and interaction with the environment that allowed animals and plants to be managed or semi-domesticated in different ways and that these choices acquired, throughout time, more importance in the manner they obtained food from the forest. Dealing with some undomesticated plants has freed humans from laborious agricultural work and from the need to choose more fertile soils as the only settlement possibility for home and production sites. We understand that this process was not an imposition from the environment, but rather, it was a cultural choice. The evidence that several plants were fully domesticated in archaeological sites shows that ancient societies knew how to cultivate, but nonetheless, gave a secondary importance to these plants, choosing a more flexible approach. This presentation will focus on four main moments of the human occupation history in Amazon: first, the arrival of the earliest comers, around 12 thousand years ago and how they interacted with a "pristine environment", we will mention evidence that these new comers initiated a process of environment manipulation following distinct strategies; second, a few millennia later, this process culminated in large occupations and populous societies in distant parts of the Amazon around the year 1000 A.D., which created a large network of exchanges (social, economic, political, material, etc.); third, we will mention how these large societies entered a moment of intense disputes in some parts of the Amazon, and subsequently experienced a population decline. When these populations apparently started to regain stability, the European contact drastically changed Amazonian societies forever with the arrival of new foreign populations. At the same time, many bias and harmful concepts emerged. Finally, we will focus on nowadays occupants, who still have a traditional life style and that were influenced by ancient indigenous societies. By dealing with these four moments of occupation, we will revisit a few key concepts like: environment, human-nature interaction, urbanism, human ecology, sustainability, negative and positive human impacts.