roosevelt,a.c. the rise and fall of the amazon chiefdoms

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt

The Rise and Fall of the Amazon ChiefdomsIn: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n°126-128. pp. 255-283.

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Roosevelt Anna Curtenius. The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n°126-128. pp. 255-283.

doi : 10.3406/hom.1993.369640

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2 S S

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt

The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chief doms. — Cumulative evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory shows greater variety and complexity among Amazonian Indian societies of the prehistoric and contact periods than exist today. The ancestors of living Indians traveled a long cultural history from early foragers who hunted with fine stone points and made rock paintings, to innovative pottery- age fisherpeople and horticulturalists, and finally to the populous, wealthy, and powerful chief doms of late prehistory. This history was truncated and impoverished when Europeans invaded and relegated Indians to ecological and societal marginality.

Indigenous Social Development in Amazonia

Amazonia has often been portrayed as a resource-poor environment that limited the development of indigenous complex societies1. The lifeways of recent Amazonian Indians, who live in small groups subsisting

on shifting cultivation and foraging, were seen as cultural adaptations to the humid tropical environment. Archaeological or documentary evidence for large- scale native complex societies was either dismissed or attributed to short-lived intrusions from Andean or Mesoamerican civilizations.

Quite a different picture of Amazonia is beginning to emerge from new field work and restudy of older work. As a habitat for indigenous human development, Amazonia seems richer and more variable than before. Plentiful resources for human subsistence are found in several areas: large floodplains, extensive coasts and estuaries, and uplands with volcanics or limestone. In such areas, the emerging human developmental sequence appears much longer and more complex than earlier conceptions allowed, including occupations by late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers with developed lithic technology and rock art, some of the earliest sedentary settlement, ceramics, and horticulture in the New World, and, in late prehistory, populous indigenous societies of substantial scale and complexity.

L'Homme 126-128, avr.-déc. 1993, XXXIII (2-4), pp. 255-283.

256 ANNA CURTENIUS ROOSEVELT

The new information about the relationship of environment, economy, and social development has general theoretical significance for anthropology, as well as for Amazonian studies, and offers practical considerations for future development in the humid tropics.

Early Hunting-Gathering Societies

Scattered evidence for a widespread early human occupation in the Amazon basin and its environs during the late Pleistocene and early Holocene is found in caves, rocksheiter s , and shellmounds.

Even the scarce finds so far give evidence for an early sequence of considerable complexity, comprising Paleo-Indian, preceramic Archaic, and initial ceramic Archaic cultures2. What is important about early hunter-gatherer societies of Amazonia is that they were not necessarily primitive in technology or aesthetics. Amazonian Paleoindians made some of the largest and finest bifacially pressure- flaked projectile points known from the Americas and painted a huge corpus of spectacular polychrome rock art. The subsistence remains from the early hunter-gatherers document a wide range of economies, from specialized hunting of large aquatic and land game to intensive, broad-spectrum harvesting of smaller faunal species and plants. Similarities between artifacts in some areas indicate long-distance travel, trade, or communication. Early Archaic peoples made less formal stone tools than earlier peoples but their pottery was the earliest in the Americas. Archaic occupation sites indicate relatively large and permanent settlements, with large middens of many hectares, depths of one to six meters, and foundations of sizable structures. Future study of such sites is needed to investigate their organization and history.

The early hunting-gathering occupations in Amazonia do not particularly resemble the living Amazonian Indians supposed to represent the survival of ancient foragers. Peoples such as the Siriono and Guajibo speakers3, for example, differ significantly from ancient ones, in art, which lacks the elaborate painting, technology, which lacks the fine stone points and often pottery, and in subsistence, which invariably includes abundant cultivated plants. These differences and the fact that the small camps of modern "foragers" often occur on large prehistoric earth mounds with elaborate pottery, carbonized maize, and the remains of large permanent structures show that these peoples do not represent the cultures of ancient foragers4. Rather, they are decimated, de- culturated, and displaced populations that were part of late prehistoric complex societies destroyed during the European conquest.

Theories about the nature of human foraging societies and ecological adaptations to tropical habitats need to address the archaeological evidence, as well as recent ethnographic evidence. Otherwise, our interpretations will be distorted by unacknowledged effects of the expansion of chief dorn and colonial societies on indigenous societies.

The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms 257

Early Horizon Horticulturalists

By 1000 B.C., there appeared in Greater Amazonia a series of cultures seemingly similar to those of present-day Amazonian horticulturalists. They mark the appearance of the earliest known elaborately decorated pottery complexes in South America and possibly the spread of village horticulture through the lowlands. The descendants of peoples of these cultures appear to have established the earliest known complex societies in Amazonia about 100 B.C.

During this period, settlements proliferate, and supraregional lowland horizon styles of elaborate geometric-zoomorphic imagery develop5. Elaborations occur in zoomorphic modeling, geometric incision, and, in some areas, red or red and white painting. Decoration of zoned hachure predominates in the western, central and southern Amazon and modeling and red and white painting are more common in the Orinoco and Guianas. The predominant vessel shape is the open bowl, although griddles, composite-silhouette bottles, pipes, and other shapes also occur in some styles. Temper varies and includes shell, grit, sherds, and/or, in some later styles, sponge-spicules.

Most recognizable representations in the art are animals, sometimes anthropomorphized. In Amazonia today, this iconography is associated with a cosmology that relates animal abundance and human fertility with shamanistic propitiation of spiritual "Masters" of the game animals6, a supernatural being that the rare humanized animals in the ancient might represent. Other than the art and the possible drug paraphernalia, ritual complexes are poorly known. Few burials or other ceremonial features have been excavated, and the stratigraphy and layout of sites is poorly documented.

The early "Horizons" of decorated pottery have considerable geographic and temporal overlap, causing difficulties in attempts to cross-date them. The styles with red and white painting and modeling and incision are the earliest dated styles so far, perhaps between c. 2000-800 B.C. in the Orinoco Basin. Styles lacking that painting develop between the time of Christ and A.D. 500 in the Orinoco. In the Amazon proper, the earliest hachure seems to begin 1500 B.C., but stratigraphie relationships and associations of the dates are unclear. By about 500 B.C., hached styles drop out in the Upper and Middle Amazon, leaving a predominance of plain incision.

It is not known whether the cultures of these horizons were developed conver- gently from earlier complexes by the interaction of local people, or if the new patterns diffused by mass migration and replacement of the local populations. With more work, it will be possible to compare changes in skeletal and dental genetics and physiology with the patterns of cultural change through time, in order to assess the applicability of the different explanations.

When the early horizon styles appeared, subsistence economies of Amazonia apparently shifted away from primary reliance on foraging game, to a combination of cultivation and foraging. The subsistence of the early horizons is poorly documented, because archaeologists have only recently started to employ


paleodietary methods in the lowlands. Subsistence of the La Gruta tradition phases of sites in the Middle Orinoco in Venezuela may shed light on the problem7. The sites contained numerous 7-9 mm long flint chips and abundant thick ceramic griddles such as those used for processing manioc today in Amazonia. Though tree fruits were recovered, there were no seeds of crops such as maize or beans. Accordingly, it is thought that subsistence was based on cultivation of root crops and hunting and fishing. A few small stemmed quartz projectile points (made by percussion flaking) have been found, and fauna including fish, aquatic mammals, turtle, and large terrestrial mammals and birds. The stable isotope pattern of human bones from the end of this occupation are consistent with, though not limited to, a diet of manioc, fish, and game.

Sites, often situated on the banks of present-day rivers and lakes, are smaller than Archaic sites, in the range of one to several hectares, with refuse accumulations of .5 to 1 m thickness, indicating appreciable stability of settlement, except at dry-season fishing camps. It may be that the development of a new economy including cultivation permitted an expansion of permanent settlement into a wider area than was previously possible, leading to the existence of more numerous but smaller sites.

Thus it is possible that the lowland tropical forest system of swidden manioc cultivation, fishing, and hunting had taken shape in Greater Amazonia by this time. Parallels with current lifeways are the importance of root over seed cropping, the reliance on faunal protein, emphasis on animal art styles, and settlement in modest, dispersed villages. But there is nonetheless a major discontinuity between the early prehistoric and recent ethnographic versions of this lifeway. This way of life actually disappeared from many areas during the first and second millennia A.D. when populations increased, agriculture intensified, and complex cultures appeared. It only came back into importance in Amazonia after the dislocations and population losses that occurred during the European Conquest.

The history of the swidden-horticultural/foraging economy in Amazonia is a clue to the conditions that made it viable: low population density and lack of intense competition over land and resources. As an adaptative complex, the importance of this subsistence system seems to have been to produce abundant calories so that faunal resources could be used for protein needs. Its disappearance during the period of population expansion in late prehistoric times may be related to the inability of the horticultural complex to exploit soil nutrients for the production of protein at a lower trophic level, through plants. For that, the cultivation had to shift from an emphasis on starchy root crops to seed crops. But since intensive annual cultivation is highly labor intensive, subsistence would have shifted back to root swiddening when Amazonian Indian populations were decimated after conquest and chief dorn political systems were destroyed.


Indigenous Complex Societies

Between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. significant changes occurred in the size, organization, and functions of indigenous societies in some areas of Amazonia. Transformations occurred in craft production, economy, demography, and social and political forms, leading to the conclusion that along the mainstreams, deltas, and piedmonts of Amazonia, there came into being that anthropologists call complex chief doms.

The historical accounts and archaeological remains document the presence of these complex societies along the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and the foothills of the Andes and Caribbean ranges. The domains of these societies were very large, sometimes tens of thousands of square kilometers in size, and these were sometimes unified under paramount chiefs. Populations were densely aggregated, and some settlements held many thousands of people. There was large- scale building of earthworks for water control, agriculture, habitation, transport, and defence. Reportedly warlike and expansionist, some societies had hierarchical social organization supported by tribute and subsistence based on intensive cropping and foraging. Crafts were highly developed for ceremony and trade and linked by widespread styles emphasizing human images in addition to the traditional animals and geometries, and there was a widespread cult of worship of the bodies and idols of chiefly ancestors. Within 100-200 years of conquest, however, the complex societies and their populations had vanished from the major floodplains and piedmonts, and nothing even remotely like them is found among the present indigenous societies of Amazonia. The complex societies' lack of representation among present-day indigenous societies in Amazonia led at first to a general lack of recognition among scholars that they had existed8. When indubitable evidence was later found in archaeological finds and ethnohistoric documents, the presence of such societies in the "tropical forest" were attributed to influence or invasions from the Andes9. However, the results of work to date do not support a foreign origin for these societies, whose earliest forms are found in the eastern lowlands of Brazil, not near the Andes. Their origin must therefore be sought in local processes of demographic and economic growth, competition, and sociopolitical interaction.

Amazonian Chiefdoms in Historical Accounts

The records of the conquest period of Amazonia, from the mid sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, found in commentaries, transcriptions, facsimiles, and translations10 give a picture of the late prehistoric and early historic complex societies.

According to the records, the Indians were very densely settled along the banks and floodplains of the major rivers. Quantitative estimates vary, but it seems clear that along much of the mainstream Amazon, settlement was continuous


and permanent, and the larger settlements held from several thousands to tens of thousands of individuals or more. Unlike today, settlements at that time seem to have been embedded within large cultural and political territories with allegiance to paramount chiefs claiming divine origine and elaborate sumptuary rights to emblems of office, certain resources and valuables, litters, and personal service. The organization of the societies seems in some cases to have been ranked or stratified in socio-political hierarchies composed of regional and local chiefs, nobles, commoners, and subordinate individuals such as servants, client foragers and farmers, and captive slaves. Societies engaged in military conquest with a pattern of conflict that included large-scale organized warfare for defense and conquest in addition to the raiding to revenge or capture of women, the most common form of indigenous conflict today.

The economies of these societies were, unlike those of present Amazonian Indians, complex and large-scale, including intensive food production of seed and root crops in both mono- and polycultural fields, intensive hunting and fishing, and long-term storage. There was considerable investment in substantial permanent facilities, such as turtle corrals, fish weirs, and permanent agricultural fields. Agriculture emphasized clear-cultivation and annual cropping more than slash-and-burn, the main method today. In many of the chief doms, maize, rather than manioc, was the staple plant. Artifacts were produced on a large scale, and quantities of high quality decorated pottery and fabrics, as well as various tools, edibles, and raw materials, were traded over long distances. There seem to have been locations that functioned like markets, where intensive trading was carried on periodically. Strings of disc beads, usually of shell, were widely used as a medium of exchange, and semi-precious stone ornaments, such as greenstones, were part of a system of elite gift-giving.

Regular community religious ceremonies were supplied with maize beer furnished from tribute by tithes, accompanied with music, and dancing. In the lower Amazon, several major polities had societal religious ideologies enhancing the position of elites through the worship of deified ancestors, often female, in whose name tribute was given. The mummies and painted images of the chief's ancestors were curated along with stone images of deities and ritual paraphernalia in special structures and refurbished for circulation during periodic ceremonies. There were specialists in charge of the religious houses and ceremonies, and also diviners and curers. Although women were not allowed to view certain ceremonies, high-ranking female town chiefs and ritual specialists are mentioned. The sources also mention the custom of matrilineal chiefly genealogy and rank endogamy for noble women. In a number of the societies observed at contact, both girls and boys were subjected to initiation ordeals and rituals considered as inductions to high rank.

Though by their nature, ethnohistoric accounts do not furnish definitive evidence of social and political organization or reliable quantitative information about subsistence or demography, the sources for Greater Amazonia contain indisputable evidence of large-scale, very populous regional societies comparable to complex chief doms and small states known in other parts of the world.


Late Prehistoric Horizon Cultures

The archaeological record of Amazonia also gives evidence of complex societies along the river floodplains and piedmonts in late prehistoric times. The millennium before the conquest is characterized by widespread true horizon styles such as the Polychrome Horizon and the Incised and Punctate Horizon. Both horizons are distantly related to the earlier sloping horizons and continue the ancient lowland pattern of incised-rim bowls and rim

Fig. 1. Marajoara polychrome effigy urn from Guajara mound, Marajo Island, Para State, Brazil. C. A.D. 500-700, 29 cm diameter.

Goeldi Museum. Drawing by K. Van Dyke.


adernos. Both also include important new shapes, subjects, and decorative styles, such as burial urns, human effigies, and complex three-color painting.

The Polychrome Horizon is characterized by pottery decorated mainly with elaborate stylized geometric patterns executed in painting (usually red, black, and white) and incision, excision, and modeling (fig. 1 et 2). Examples of local styles are Marajoara of the mouth of the Amazon11, Guarita of the Middle Amazon12, both in Brazil, Caimito of the Upper Amazon in Peru13, Napo of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador14, and Araracuara of the Caqueta in the Colombian Amazon15.

The Incised and Punctate Horizon pottery styles have abundant modeled ornaments and dense incision and punctation. Local phases of the horizon are Santarem of the Lower Amazon16, Itacoatiara of the Middle Amazon17,

Fig. 2. Incised and modeled Marajoara zoomorphic burial urn from Os Camutins mound group, c. A.D. 500-700. University of Pennsylvania Museum.


both in Brazil, the late prehistoric culture of Faldas de Sangay in the Ecuadorian Amazon18, Hertenrits of Surinam19, Camoruco and Arauquin of the Middle Orinoco20, and Valencia of the Caribbean coast range21, all in Venezuela.

The late prehistoric horizons spread rapidly over territories comparable in size to those of chief doms described in the historic accounts, a process traditionally interpreted by anthropologists as evidence of the expansion of conquest chief doms or states. Within the horizons there seems to have been continuing interregional stylistic communication during much of the late prehistoric period, possibly produced by a network of alliances, intermarriage, and war among the elites of regional cultures.

Artifacts: Function and Iconography

The occupation sites of the Amazonian chiefdoms contain an abundance of artifacts and other remains. The most abundant are ceramic sherds and vessels of the horizon styles22. There must have been a high rate of production of artifacts, which have been recovered by the thousands, despite the small amount of excavation that has yet been done. The magnitude of archaeological production parallels ethnohistoric evidence for intensive craft production and trade.

Material culture in the chiefdoms seems to have been very complex, and many different kinds of artifacts have been found: pottery vessels, effigies (fig. 3), drug paraphernalia, musical instruments, stools, whorls, stamps, stools, pubic covers (fig. 4), stone cutting tools, shaft-straighteners, grinders, pounders, abraders, and ornaments of jade and other semiprecious rocks. The presence of numerous igneous rock items in sites in purely sedimentary basins testifies to the long-distance trade of lithics. Studies of material trace-elements and isotopes are needed to trace the extent and history of long-distance trade in lithics and pottery. Spindle whorls increase in numbers and types, suggesting increasing scale and complexity of textile production. The soils occupied by many chiefdoms are often of clayey, high pH types considered good cotton soils, and production of this fiber may have been an important industry.

The iconography of the horizon styles may give additional evidence of the nature of the ancient societies' organization, economies, and religion. The art of the late prehistoric styles has an emphasis of the human image not found earlier. Though animals are common, humans are usually larger, more central images. The human image may have become more important when intensive agriculture made labor and land valuable and their control a factor requiring ideological justification. It is often found in mortuary contexts and may relate to elite ancestral mortuary cults such as those mentioned by the conquistadors.

Male images, which are much rarer than females, are mainly represented as shaman/chiefs, on stools, carrying rattles, wearing special hats and shoulder bags, and as alter ego figures with an animal on their shoulders. A concept


Fig. 3. Phallic figurine rattle from Marajo. Height 20 cm. After Nordenskiold 1930.

Fig. 4. Marajoara polychrome pubic cover of tanga. 14 cm. American Museum of Natural History. Drawing by Kimberly van Dyke.


of hierarchy and subordination may be discerned in the imagery representing small human figures as appendages or supports to large ones. Other than the chief/shaman images, males seldom appear in the art, except as disembodied genital images in the phallic female figurines, and female images are much more common. The prevalence of women in the art of Lower Amazon phases such as Santarem and Marajoara (70-90%) might relate to the reckoning of chiefly descent from mythical female ancestors, as mentioned in the historic accounts. In the ancient art of the earlier chief doms, women, like men, are shown on stools, with shamanistic symbols, and as alter ego figures, although women shaman are rare today, and women are usually forbidden to sit on ritual stools, considered the prerogative of political leaders and shaman. Later, they are shown more commonly offering food or holding children. The changing role of females in prehistoric Amazonian art through time suggests a change in gender ideology and possibly gender roles during the sociopolitical transitions going on in the Amazon floodplains in late prehistoric times.

Habitat and Economy

The archaeological phases of the late prehistoric horizon styles seem to occur in characteristic kinds of biomes, such as the piedmonts and major floodplains of rivers carrying sediment eroded from the mountains. The major mound- building complexes are found in the broadest expanses of recent alluvium, in the plains of the Bolivian Amazon, the Apure Delta of the Middle Orinoco, Guiana coastal plains, and Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon (fig. 5).

The archaeological phases of the resource-poor interfluvial areas of the region seem to lack the cultural complexity and magnitude of the floodplain phases with certain important exceptions. The exceptions are the interfluvial regions distinguished by geological deposits that have enriched local soils with nutrients, such as the Caribbean Coastal range in Venezuela, and the Andean foothills in the Upper Amazon and western Orinoco. Little work has been done in the interfluves, however, and there is still the possibility that anthropologists have found more substantial archaeological remains along the main rivers and Andean foothills only because these areas are more accessible for research. To investigate the role of environmental factors in the rise of lowland complex societies, it will be important in the future to compare the prehistoric occupation of a variety of regions.

Anthropologists have often assumed that the manioc, fish, game pattern of indigenous subsistence today was also the major exploitation system of the entire prehistoric period. However, this idea was based on the assumption that the present ethnographic pattern is representative of the ancient pattern and that the Amazonian environment was too poor for intensive agricultural exploitation. What some of the new archaeological findings show is that many of the late prehistoric societies of the floodplains of Amazonia had highly


WUfSKKí ? .

Fig. 5 . View of Marajo Island. Tall forest at center is growing on a cluster of prehistoric artifical mounds, the Monte Carmelo mound group. 1983.

intensive agricultural subsistence systems. During the period of expanding populations and chief dorn sociopolitical development, there was an increasing reliance on staple seed crops such as maize for both protein and calories and decreasing consumption of starchy tropical root crops and fauna, the pattern that was more characteristic of the first two millennia before Christ. The presumed advantage of the seeds seems to have been the intensive exploitation of the richer soils for production of more storable starch and protein than could be produced by economies of root cropping and foraging. This pattern of subsistence change parallels economic processes that occurred during the late prehistoric period in North America and in many parts of the Old World during the Neolithic Stage23.

Although previous investigation has focused almost exclusively on ceramic and lithic remains, there is a very striking abundance and variety of prehistoric biological remains that record ancient subsistence (fig. 6). Where these remains have been collected, sites have produced thousands of animal bones and


Fig. 6 Prehistoric food remains at a Marajoara mound, Teso dos Bichos, a) Microscopic bones from small fish, the mainstay of the diet, and b) vertebrum from Arapaima gigas, "pirarucu", from a special cache. 6.5 cm. c) Carbonized seed of Euterpe oleraceae palm, "acai". 1.4 cm.

identifiable plant remains24, produced significant information about subsistence during the development of the complex societies. Crops such as maize or Indian corn appear to enter the subsistence systems of the floodplains of Greater Amazonia during the first millennium B.C., when there is a rather rapid increase in size and number of archaeological sites. Stable isotope results and dental pathologies of the late prehistoric people suggest that seed crops became quite important between A.D. 500 and the conquest, and site sizes and numbers continued to expand25. Faunal protein continues as a protein supplement, with aquatic faunal remains predominating greatly over terrestrial in the floodplains, presumably because of the high biomass and turnover rate of fish in this habitat, compared to terrestrial animals.

In some areas, such as Marajo Island the collection and/or cultivation of small-seed local floodplain grasses and chenopods may have preceded the adoption of maize26. This pattern may have begun soon after the time of Christ there. Prehistoric skeletons and food remains dating between A.D. 400 and 1100 indicate a cereal staple, supplemented with small fish, but the bone chemistry indicates levels of maize consumption at only 20 to 30% of the


;':j:-VJ Gollery Forest i 1 Archaeological material I* * 1 exposed at surface |L*y^ Archaeological mound

0 Dry season river bed

Fig. 7. Marajoara mound sites at Os Camutins site.

diet. The small seed economy may have been a local development, rather than a diffused economy, as it seems to have been in the prehistoric seed-cropping economy of the Southeastern United States.

The late prehistoric subsistence patterns contrast with current Amazonian ethnographic subsistence, which focuses on starchy crops supplemented with fish and game27. The dislocations and depopulation of the historic period apparently brought a return to the less intensive root crop and animal capture economies of the early prehistoric period. The shifting cultivation, hunting,


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Fig. 8. Map of Marajoara mound at Guajara of the Monte Carmelo mound group, near Os Camutins, c. A.D. 500-1300.


Fig. 9. Superimposed house floors in looters pit at Camutins mound, Os Camutins site.

and fishing subsistence of ethnographic Indians seems thus to be a return to the way of life that existed in the Amazon before the development of the intensive economies of the populous chief doms.

Settlement Patterns

Associated with the spread of the late prehistoric horizon styles is a substantial increase in the size, number, and complexity of human occupation sites soon after the time of Christ. Occupation sites are often several kilometers long and densely packed with cultural and biological remains to depths of several

Fig. 10 a

F/g. 10 b .F/g. 10. Baked clay cooking stoves at Teso dos Bichos, c. A.D. 800:

a) top view; b) side view.

The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chief doms 273

meters. Many floodplain occupation sites are artificial earthen mounds composed of numerous superimposed building stages and ruined earthen constructions (fig. 7-10). Though small, simple sites are the most numerous, many of the large sites appear to be complex, multi-function deposits, with special purpose craft areas, such as jewelry or stone tool manufacturing areas, ceremonial areas, defensive earthworks, cemeteries and mounds, domestic activity areas, and the remains of substantial domestic structures and facilities, such as dwellings and stoves. Only a few of these large, complex sites have yet been comprehensively investigated. Though most general sources refer to prehistoric Amazonian settlements as non-urban, the late prehistoric Amazonian archaeological sites and earthworks are unexpectedly substantial and complex.

Large-scale mound-building cultures developed in several areas of Greater Amazonia: the Llanos de Mojos and Chiquitos of the Bolivian Amazon28, the uplands of the Ecuadorian Amazon29, Marajo Island at the Mouth of the Amazon30, the coastal plain of the Guianas31, and the Middle Orinoco32. Many earthworks in these areas include raised and ditched fields, dikes, canals, wells, ponds, causeways, roads, and mounds for habitation and burial. Mounds were raised either by heaping up thick layers of soil from borrow pits or by the gradual accumulation of refuse and ruined adobe buildings. Some of the habitats of the mound cultures have deep seasonal flooding, and year-round settlements must be raised out of the water. However, many of these mounds were built up many meters higher than flood-levels of the time, which suggests that they may have been raised for defense or display. Little systematic survey of earthworks has been done, and many have been covered up by sedimentation on the floodplains.

The scale and extent of the Amazonian earthworks and occupation sites are extraordinary. Many mounds are from 3 to 10 meters in height and several hectares in area. Some multimound sites on Marajo Island are more than 10 square kilometers in area with from 20 to 40 individual mounds, and a multimound site in the uplands of the Ecuadorian Amazon has an area of 12 square kilometers. Even the archaeological sites produced only by accretion of living refuse make up an appreciable part of the landsurface along the Amazon and Orinoco riverbanks. These late prehistoric archaeological deposits are massive and often continuous for miles and are densely packed with artifacts and carbonized plant remains.

The massive dwelling sites indicate a prehistoric occupation much more substantial and sedentary than the slight, nomadic occupation earlier envisioned for Amazonia. Such sites cannot be explained as accretions from long periods of sparse, shifting habitation, for the chronologies indicate that they accrued rapidly, with periods of several hundred years represented by several meters of refuse in some cases. In many regions these sites represent prehistoric populations that were apparently much larger c. A.D. 1500 than present-day indigenous populations of Amazonia. According to hearth counts and comparisons with world-wide averages of site area per population, not a few


Amazonian sites represent populations of several thousand and a few are large enough to have had populations in the tens of thousands at least.

Many large cemeteries with hundreds of burials have been found in habitation sites and mounds. The majority are spatially concentrated urn cemeteries, but some earthen shaft tombs with stone covers with urn burials have been found as well. The elaborate and varied burial assemblages in these cemeteries are thought to represent significant interpersonal differences in rank. Because of protection in the covered urns and the near-neutral pH of soil, human skeletal remains are commonly quite well-preserved33 (fig. 11). Few of them have been recorded or analyzed, but those in museums and private collections reveal highly differentiated populations with a range of age, sex, disease, physiological condition, and bone chemistry. Despite the potential socioeconomic information the vast cemeteries could yield, no prehistoric Amazonian cemetery has yet been studied systematically by a physical anthropologist.

Thus the scale and complexity of settlement and construction in the late prehistoric societies of Greater Amazonia are more like societies identified as complex chief doms and "primitive" states elsewhere in the world than to the settlements of the present Indians of Amazonia.

The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms

Earlier anthropologists projected the ethnographic picture of Amazonia into prehistoric times as the characteristic adaptation to Amazonian environments. When more complex archaeological manifestations were recognised, these were interpreted as short-lived invasions from the Andean or Mesoamerican civilizations, which decayed rapidly in the tropical environment. The new archaeological evidence, however, suggests the presence for more than a thousand years of populous complex societies of indigenous origins, with urban-scale settlements, intensive subsistence and craft-production systems, and rituals and ideologies linked to systems of social hierarchy and political centralization.

The new information about Amazonian prehistory documents a sequence of much more complex social, demographic, economic, and ecological change than we had realized. The evidence for early cultural innovations in Amazonia, such as initial pottery and sedentism, and horticulture, suggests that our previous notions of geography of indigenous cultural development in South America need to be revised. The discovery of correlations between the development of complex cultures and significant shifts in demography and subsistence prepares the way for understanding these cultures in both ecological and historical context.

Given the widespread occurrence of such societies and their long-term persistence, it seems unlikely that the habitat was too poor to support them, and, indeed, environmental studies suggest that there were plentiful resources. Their demise, instead, seems correlated with the European conquest of the Americas. The conquerors defeated the native chiefdoms and replaced


Fig. 11. Male cranium with cribra orbitalia anemia pathology, from Marajo Island. The bun-shaped occiput is a morphological feature common in Amazonian populations.

Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.


their political and military complexes. Surviving native sociopolitical formations became geared to resistance, subservience, or isolation. In what had been heavily populated areas, native populations were decimated, which essentially removed the necessity of intensive land use. Ranching and specialized extraction replaced agriculture and horticulture in many areas, and numerous Indian groups were relegated to resource-poor areas not appropriate for intensive land use.

The lifeways of living Amazonian Indians can therefore be seen as adaptations not only to the environment but also to their changing demography and relationships with other societies. Without taking the complexity of such interactions into consideration, we cannot adequately explain the nature and history of native Amazonian societies.

Field Museum of Natural History and University of Illinois, Chicago

NOTES

1. Meggers 1954, 1971; Steward 1949. 2. Boomert 1980a; Bryan 1978, 1983; Bryan et al. 1978; Evans & Meggers 1960; Miller 1987;

Roosevelt 1989a, 1989b, 1991, and n.d.; Roosevelt et al. 1991, 1992; Schmitz 1987, 1991; Simoes 1976, 1981.

3. Holmberg 1969; Hurtado & Hill 1991. 4. Roosevelt, n.d. 5. Boomert 1983; Meggers & Evans 1961, 1983; Lathrap 1970; Cruxent & Rouse 1958-1959;

Roosevelt 1980; Rouse & Cruxent 1963; Rouse & Allaire 1978. 6. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971. 7. Roosevelt 1980; Van der Merwe et al. 1981. 8. Steward 1949. 9. e.g. Meggers & Evans 1957. 10. e.g. Bettendorf 1910; de Heriarte 1964; Daniel 1840-1841; Palmatary 1950, 1960; Fritz 1922;

Markham 1859; Myers 1973, 1974; Rowe, ed., 1952; Denevan 1966, 1976; Meggers 1971; Lathrap 1970; Acuna 1891; Gumilla 1955; Medina, ed., 1934; Carvajal 1892; Castellanos 1955; Bezerra de Meneses 1972; Morey Í975; Porro 1989; other references summarized in Roosevelt 1980, 1987.

11. Meggers & Evans 1957; Roosevelt 1991. 12. Hilbert 1968. 13. Lathrap 1970; Weber 1975. 14. Evans & Meggers 1968. 15. Herrera et al. 1983; Eden et al. 1984. 16. Palmatary 1960; Bezerra de Meneses 1972. 17. Hilbert 1959, 1968. 18. Athens 1989; Porras 1987. 19. Boomert 1976, 1980b. 20. Petrullo 1939; Roosevelt 1980, 1992. 21. Kidder 1944.


22. Rouse & Cruxent 1963; Nordenskiold 1924a, 1930; Lathrap 1970; Meggers 1947; Meggers & Evans 1957, 1961, 1983; Hilbert 1968; Palmatary 1950, 1960; Roosevelt 1980, 1991, 1992.

23. Cohen & Armelagos, eds., 1984. 24. Roosevelt 1980, 1984, 1989a, 1989b; Roosevelt et al. 1991; Wing, Garson & Simons, n.d.;

Garson 1980; Smith & Roosevelt, n.d. 25. Van der Mer we et al. 1981; Roosevelt 1989a. 26. Brochado [1980]; Roosevelt 1991, Tabl. 6. 7. 27. Hames & Vickers, eds., 1983. 28. Erickson 1980; Nordenskiold 1913, 1916, 1924a, 1924b; Denevan 1966. 29. Porras 1987. 30. Derby 1879; Meggers & Evans 1957; Roosevelt 1991. 31. Boomert 1976, 1980b. 32. Castellanos 1955; Cruxent 1952, 1966; Rouse & Cruxent 1963; Cruxent & Rouse 1958-1959;

Devenan & Zucchi 1978. 33. Greene [1986].

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RÉSUMÉ

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, Développement et disparition des chefferies amazoniennes. — Les données de l'archéologie et de Pethnohistoire montrent que les sociétés indigènes amazoniennes étaient bien plus élaborées et différenciées, dans les temps précolombiens, qu'elles ne le sont aujourd'hui. Des industries lithiques raffinées et des gravures rupestres des anciens chasseurs-cueilleurs aux traditions céramiques novatrices des premières sociétés riveraines et horticoles, puis à l'émergence des chefferies puissantes, riches et densément peuplées de la préhistoire tardive, le parcours historique des Amérindiens des basses terres a été long et complexe. Cette trajectoire a été tronquée puis appauvrie par l'invasion européenne qui a relégué les Indiens dans la marginalité écologique et sociale.

RESUMEN

Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, Desarrollo y desaparición de las jefacturas amazónicas. — Los datos de la arqueología y la etnohistoria muestran como en la época precolombina, las sociedades indígenas amazónicas estaban mucho mas elaboradas y diferenciadas que hoy. De las refinadas industrias líticas y los gravados rupestres de los antiguos cazadores-recolectores a las tradiciones de cerámica innovadoras de las primeras sociedades ribereñas y hortícolas, luego a la emergencia de las jefacturas ricas y densamente pobladas de la prehistoria tardia, la evolución histórica de los Amerindios de las tierras bajas ha sido larga y compleja. Esta trayectoria fue trocada y empobrecida por la invasión europea, la cual relegó a los Indios a la marginalidad ecológica y social.

roosevelt,a.c. the rise and fall of the amazon chiefdoms

Documents

roosevelt anna curtenius

indigenous human development

s s anna curtenius roosevelt

amazonia amazonia

indigenous social development

early foragers

future development

early holocene