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Accepted Paper:
Untangling pre and post-colonial impacts upon biocultural landscapes in the Amazon
Jennifer Watling
(University of São Paulo)
This talk presents some of the methods currently used to study past human impacts in the Amazon forest and discusses some of the difficulties faced while trying to untangle pre- and post-colonial landscape legacies in tropical environments.
Paper long abstract:
Despite significant advances in our understanding of how indigenous land-use shaped biodiversity in the Amazon rainforest, there are several key questions that remain unanswered, particularly in relation to the consequences of European invasion upon existing biocultural landscapes. These include: how did indigenous management practices and forest composition vary between different regions of the Amazon in 1500?; to what extent did the rainforest "recover" after the ensuing demographic collapse of its indigenous populations?; is extensive slash-and-burn agriculture a post-colonial phenomenon?; and how did different post-colonial and capitalist extractivist cycles (e.g. the Rubber Boom) shape current biodiversity? This paper presents a summary of available data on this topic, highlighting the contributions of innovative approaches combining archaeological and palaeoecological datasets, and discusses some of the methodological challenges that face researchers seeking to compare pre- and post-colonial land-use in tropical environments.