The geography of South America is extremely varied with a long range of high mountains, the Andes, along the west coast and the eastern and northern parts of the continent in various tropical forests with enormous river systems, semi-arid deserts, and the cold plains of the Pampas and Patagonia. These fostered the development of a series of extremely distinctive societies, from giant multiethnic conquest states to simple hunters and gatherers.

The northern and eastern lowlands of the South America continent are marked by extreme regional diversity of landforms coupled with the ease of communication (by canoe) over immense distances. In the Amazon proper numbers of autochthonous kingdoms have been delineated where as in the Orinoco plains and those of the Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia cultures features built up residential (islands) connected by long causeways and drain field systems prevailed.

Ceramics manufacture and use followed a very different trajectory in South American than in the rest of the world. The first ceramics in Peru were late and the earliest complex societies were completely aceramic while in the northern Andes extremely early ceramic traditions flourished and multiplied.

The incumbent president consistently and systematically sowed doubts about the integrity of the American electoral process throughout the 2020 presidential campaign. Trump’s campaign tactic had effects on voters. In this chapter, we show that public confidence in the integrity of the election is much lower for Republicans and for people paying attention to conservative news compared to Democrats and consumers of left-leaning news. Further, a propensity to believe in conspiracy theories fuels doubts about the security of the election. In addition, we show that a number of psychological predispositions consistently influence people’s assessments of Biden’s and Trump’s ability to safeguard the election, including people’s level of racial resentment and level of hostile sexism. Finally, people’s confidence in the security of the election is associated with positive changes in overall evaluations of Biden and negative changes in overall evaluations of Trump from September to October.

Beginning ca. 3800BC large circular temples with associated platforms and structures began to appear along the Peru coast, especially in the Norte Chico. Hypotheses concerning this sudden and completely preceramic development include the intensification of irrigation agriculture, a dependance upon maritime resources, and possible climatic changes.

Despite the sharp decline in the number of local newspapers, it’s important to understand that other legacy news-delivery platforms – particularly local TV news – have not been suffering the same degree of loss. Pew Research Center found that local TV news actually saw its audience increase across the evening and late-night timeslots in 2020, and that local TV companies earned more revenue than the previous year.1 In fact, local TV was deemed to be on par with or outpacing cable and network TV. Pew survey data show more Americans still prefer to get their local news from television than from any other medium, including online. Even with an increasing preference for digital delivery, “local television stations have retained a strong hold in the local news ecosystem.”2

The last centuries before the European invasions were marked by the rise of an immense conquest state in the Andes, that of the Inca and a smaller series of warring kingdoms, the Muisca, on the Sabana de Bogotá and the large and equally warring kingdoms or chiefdoms of the Tupinamba in eastern Brazil. The range of difference between these kingdoms (and empire) is significant but all were marked by a bellicose orientation and, in the case of the Tupinamba, by ritual cannibalism.

Iconographic studies of pictorial art are important clues to belief systems in non-literate societies. In South America intensive study of the pictorial Moche style has led to a new understanding of its religious practices, while in the north studies of a number of metallurgical styles have shown belief systems concerning shamanism and the importance of carnivores in mythology.

It is usually a mistake to suppose that a company is the best judge of how its business works.1 Or that an industry is the best judge of how the industry works. AT&T is a good example. When the Justice Department sat down with management in 1981 to negotiate a breakup of what was then a monopoly provider of telephone service, government lawyers asked which part of the company management wanted to keep after the breakup – the long-distance operations or the regional networks.2 The long-distance operations had long been the company’s most profitable, so management asked for those.3

The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police over Memorial Day weekend ignited sustained protests across the country and placed the issue of race front and center. As we show in this chapter, by September, more than two-thirds of our survey respondents report positive views of the Black Lives Matter movement. While the salience of race began to fade as the general election campaign unfolded, we find that political characteristics of citizens, such as party attachment and partisan media exposure, influence support for the social justice movement and support for law enforcement. Further, psychological predispositions consistently and significantly influence views of social protests and policing. For example, people’s level of racial resentment produces powerful changes in their views of the protests and police from September to October. Finally, attitudes about racial justice and policing influence overall impressions of Biden and Trump, producing significant changes in people’s views of the candidates during the first months of the fall campaign.

Media have traditionally relied on a mix of advertising and subscription revenue to keep the lights on – and to produce a mix of high-quality, thoughtful, well researched, compelling news, information, educational, and other content that is necessary in a modern democracy. The internet has disrupted those revenue streams. And while some media outlets have shored themselves up on other sources of support – grants, government transfers and licensing fees, wealthy patrons, or the like – such funding is both the exception and de minimis in the overall operation of our media ecosystem.

Trust in media institutions has declined more or less apace with trust in every other kind of major institution in public life. Or perhaps it is more correct, as Ashutosh Bhagwat observes in his contribution to this project, to say that trust has declined in the types of media institutions, the proverbial Walter Cronkites, that dominated “the media” during the twentieth-century period when modern American ideals around free speech and journalistic value were still taking form.