Paper short abstract:

Amazonian biodiversity and forest reflect a long-term indigenous history of plant cultivation and foodways, highly impacted during European colonization, which this paper aims analyze by comparing archaeological foodway remains to historical documents regarding food consumption and biotechnologies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to address the quality of impact of the European colonialism in traditional indigenous foodways and biotechnologies in the Amazon basin, integrating material culture and written documents. Through archaeobotanical and organic residues data, it is known that the biodiversity of the Amazon results of a long-term process of food management dating back to 14k BP, and that cultural niche construction integrates foodscapes composed by plants, animals and people. The forest structure reflects human preferences for food plants, creating it’s hyperdominance in the biota. The colonial and neo-colonial practices of transforming local foods in global commodities, and the historical ethnocide, human displacement and deforestation has promoted also a biodiversity erosion and the loss of traditional knowledges of forest conservation. Promoting hungry and food insecurity was/is a colonial strategy of domination and an allied in breaking ancestral bounds to the territory and social networks, resulting in a “forgotten” biodiversity and intermit foodways. The “occult” face of the Columbian Exchange acted, among other ways, by replacing what was considered “wild” foods (as the fermented caxiris) by monocultural cultivation of exotic plants of economic importance and industrial logic of consumption (as distilled beverages), contributing to the process of pauperization of indigenous groups. Some of these foods are, however, reemerging in a scenario of land recovery (roots such as aria and mairá) while other remain buried in the ancestral ground (i.e. indigenous breads). In this scenario Archaeology can help unearth the roots of food colonization and present paths through food security and recovery.