This timely book springs from The Upper Amazon, the landmark 1970 book by Donald Lathrap that advocated for Amazonian archaeology and championed the importance of precolumbian Amazonians to any cultural history of South America and the Western Hemisphere. Almost every author in this edited volume acknowledges their debt to Lathrap's research along the boundary between the Andes and the Amazon. With a list of contributors whose work spans three generations, the book grows from these deep roots, placing these new studies within a network of conversations and arguments from the past five decades.
An issue for the study of this area is its definition. Geographic terms (like the hydrological limits of the Amazon) appear straightforward, but regions near the edges are often shunted between one designation (the Andes) and the other (the Amazon), so even though they are often solemnly acknowledged as being important, they are only rarely considered seriously. Here the editors and authors work explicitly to push past the idea that the Upper Amazon must be confined to a stereotype; for example, the pattern of a barrier (a la Steward in his explanation of linguistic diversity at the base of the Andes mountains as a wall). Scholarship has come of age in the sense that none of these larger narratives seems to account for the variety of interpretations and new evidence presented here. Thankfully, the book is not limited by a single motif of frontier, boundary, barrier, or anything else.
In the 50 years since Lathrap wrote, the role of such a book on regional archaeology has changed. Although in 1970 it might have been possible to gain a working knowledge of the archaeological literature across much of the world from reading such secondary sources, in 2022 the problem of information retrieval, evaluation, and synthesis has expanded greatly. The task undertaken by The Upper Amazon is no longer possible. Instead, The Archaeology of the Upper Amazon guides the interested student to what has become a broad and deep literature in many associated fields: archaeology, paleoenvironmental reconstruction, history, anthropology, linguistics, bioarchaeology, and geography.
The succinct and incisive concluding chapter by Warren DeBoer makes it difficult to write an original review. One of our great archaeological writers, DeBoer cannot be outdone for placing the chapters of this book into the context of larger arguments while keeping the details of ceramic analysis, linguistic anthropology, and bioarchaeology at the center of the picture. As with other parts of the Western Hemisphere, on closer inspection the Upper Amazon turns out to have an archaeological record that is much more varied and extensive than previously supposed. As DeBoer memorably puts it, the region includes archaeological celebrities—“the earlies, biggies, and onlies (words that defy spellcheck),” (p.284)—that should draw archaeologists of other parts of the Americas to seek specific comparisons and develop hypotheses.
Chapter 7 (Pazmiño) is an entry point into research in the Upano Valley in Ecuador, where lidar data reveal the intricacy and extent of spatially organized platforms, roads, and plazas. The author taps into conversations about urbanism (under different definitions) and draws on a rich set of publications. Chapter 4 (Valdez) details a combination of distinctive monumental architecture, elaborate material culture, and the earliest chocolate in the Americas. Chapter 8 (Clasby) uses the details of ceramic description and chronology to highlight the importance of the Upper Amazon during the Early Intermediate period (EIP; AD 1–650). Although this period is usually associated with Moche, Nazca, and Recuay traditions, to name only three, the independence of other traditions is illustrated by the development and interpretation of ceramic chronology. The reanalysis of legacy data from previous decades (Raymond, Chapter 9, and Hastings, Chapter 10) shows how questions like the identification of highland (Wari) ceramic traditions in lowland places have changed since the 1960s. Hastings's contribution also combines ethnohistory and archaeology to reexamine the characterization of the archaeological record through the principle of verticality. Alconini's Chapter 13, on the origin and movement of Tupi-Guarani speakers in southeastern Bolivia (distinct from Mojos in northeastern Bolivia), is a surprising revelation: it describes a territory with some unity in material culture covering an area that is “subcontinental” in scale—from southeastern Bolivia through Paraguay, Uruguay, and parts of Argentina and Brazil—over thousands of years.
The book will make an excellent textbook for a class on South American archaeology, and it annotates essentially all the literature for a specialized course of reading. The book will thus be valuable for both graduate students and for advanced undergraduates. Production values are excellent, with clear reproduction of well-designed graphics and photographs, heavyweight paper, and a compelling cover. The book is very well edited, both in the quality of the writing and in the selection of authors. A specific example of the editors’ larger vision is the brief second chapter (by Kenneth Young), which guides the nonspecialist through details of physical geography and plant communities, information that that is useful to every chapter. All edited volumes on a particular location or area should have such a chapter.
Archaeology across the continent and in the Upper Amazon is accelerating rapidly. It is time to abandon the narrative of the area as a significant yet somehow unknown appendix to either the Andes or the Amazon. The works of these scholars make it clear that the archaeological record of the Upper Amazon should be integrated into consideration of archaeological questions in South America and in the Western Hemisphere. There are no more unknown regions. There are no more lost cities.
