Paper short abstract:

In this paper it is suggested that the dominance of holistic, ethnographic accounts – including those that invoke historical ecology – continues, against considerable evidence from the pre-historical and historical records, to set the agenda for Amazonian anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

The long-prevailing view that forest Indian societies (of the types today represented by a relatively small number of indigenous peoples) are typical of pre-conquest Amazonian social formations has been challenged periodically. Most recently, the work of Heckenberger and colleagues in the upper Xingu has forced reconsideration of such typicality, but since the time of Carvajal, and in diverse ways expressed by Nimuendaju, Levi-Strauss, Lathrap, Denevan, Porro and Roosevelt, revised images of Amazonia have uneasily co-existed with the dominant anthropological theme of marginal, contingent, nomadic societies. Despite strong evidence that might plausibly demand a broadscale re-evalution of the dominant research strands in Amazonian anthropology, the tendency has been to consider the (proto-)revisionist implications of archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence for large-scale, complex societies as an addition to the record rather than one that serious undermines long-held assumptions.