2.28 - Prehistory of Amazonia

Summary

History of Research

In 20th-century theories about prehistory, it was thought that the Amazonian environment limited human cultural evolution to a static “tropical rainforest culture”. The habitat’s biological complexity and the broad climatic buffer of its equatorial warmth and moisture maintained diverse forest vegetation and an expansive riverine network for millions of years. Local habitats that have been investigated archaeologically in the region have also been continuously occupied since at least 13,500 years ago. But, despite strong continuity of the main habitat and of its human populations, Amazonians devised a myriad of very distinct and different regional cultures and ecological adaptations over that long period, not just the one “tropical forest culture” envisioned by Limitation Theorists (Roosevelt 2010). Furthermore, local cultures, rather than pale reflections of advanced cultures in adjacent regions, had distinctive complexity and scale and significant influence on the other regions. Thus, we have a paradox: in prehistoric Amazonia, a relatively stable environment, the indigenous human cultures and societies were tenacious, innovative, dynamic and expansive.

Major prescientific researchers on Amazonian prehistory in late-19th- and early-20th-century Brazil include L. Netto, who wrote about Marajoara art and society; D. S. Penna, who wrote on the shell mound cultures of the Lower Amazon; E. Goeldi, who wrote on the Ariste funerary culture at the mouth of the Amazon; and C. Hartt, who wrote on all the cultures. Hartt was a young Canadian trained at Harvard, who worked for both North American and Brazilian institutions and built a team of brilliant young researchers. He was the most able, critical and productive of these scholars.