It has also been suggested that this pervasive historical human influence on Amazonian forest ecosystems should change our views on their resilience to human impacts and influence our approach to their conservation ( 19). 1492 occurred on a scale large enough to contribute to an early anthropogenic influence on the global carbon cycle ( 17), and was a significant forcing of Holocene climate perturbations ( 18). It has been proposed that deforestation and biomass burning before the collapse of native Amazonian populations following European contact in A.D. Whereas some argue for a relatively limited and localized human influence ( 10– 13), others have described pre-Columbian Amazonia as a “cultural parkland,” which was widely impacted by human disturbance ( 14– 16). The scale of these societies’ environmental impact and its potential legacy in modern Amazonian forest ecosystems are hotly debated. 1492) is emerging from a growing number of archaeological sites across the Amazon Basin ( 1– 9). Our findings demonstrate that current debates over the magnitude and nature of pre-Columbian Amazonian land use, and its impact on global biogeochemical cycling, are potentially flawed because they do not consider this land use in the context of climate-driven forest–savanna biome shifts through the mid-to-late Holocene.Įvidence for the existence of large and socially complex societies in Amazonia before the arrival of Europeans (pre-A.D.
This finding implies far less labor-and potentially lower population density-than previously supposed. Earthwork construction and agriculture on terra firme landscapes currently occupied by the seasonal rainforests of southern Amazonia may therefore not have necessitated large-scale deforestation using stone tools. Instead, we show that the inhabitants exploited a naturally open savanna landscape that they maintained around their settlement despite the climatically driven rainforest expansion that began ∼2,000 y ago across the region. This approach revealed evidence for an alternative scenario of Amazonian land use, which did not necessitate labor-intensive rainforest clearance for earthwork construction.
We tested these assumptions using coupled local- and regional-scale paleoecological records to reconstruct land use on an earthwork site in northeast Bolivia within the context of regional, climate-driven biome changes. The discovery of hundreds of large geometric earthworks beneath intact rainforest across southern Amazonia challenges its status as a pristine landscape, and has been assumed to indicate extensive pre-Columbian deforestation by large populations. 1492) Amazonia was largely “pristine” and sparsely populated by slash-and-burn agriculturists, or instead a densely populated, domesticated landscape, heavily altered by extensive deforestation and anthropogenic burning. There is considerable controversy over whether pre-Columbian (pre-A.D.
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