Avaliação: Historia indígena de larga duración en los dos mayores sistemas fluviales de Sudamérica: las cuencas del Amazonas y del Plata – Overview of the HERCA project: Human-Environment Relationships in pre-Columbian Amazonia

The dynamics of past human-environment relationships in Amazonia is one of the most relevant issues in archaeology today. Recent ground-breaking discoveries of sedentary, stratified, pre-Columbian societies have overturned the paradigm that environmental constraints limited cultural development in Amazonia to semi-nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyles, as practiced by indigenous peoples today. However, the process by which these stratified societies emerged and declined, and their relationships with the environment, remain unresolved. The HERCA project is jointly funded by the UK (AHRC) and Brazil (FAPESP) and seeks to address this problem by assembling an international, inter-disciplinary, team of researchers from UK, European, Brazilian, and Bolivian institutions. The overall aim is to determine the relationships between the emergence and demise of stratified societies, food procurement strategies, and environmental conditions in Pre-Columbian Amazonia.
The project integrates archaeology, palaeoecology, palaeoclimatology, and geomorphology to address two overarching questions:
1. What are the relationships between the emergence of social stratification, food procurement strategy, and environmental conditions (forest cover, soil fertility, flood/drought risk, climate change) in SW Amazonia?
2. When, how and why did stratified societies collapse in different environmental settings?
Three study areas have been chosen across SW Amazonia which encompass a spectrum of environmental conditions, in terms of forest cover, flooding regime, and soil fertility. This talk will explain the research design and site selection strategy needed to effectively integrate our different methodologies and address the HERCA project aims. Opportunities and challenges for applying our inter-disciplinary research model to tackle pre-Columbian human-environment relationships elsewhere in the Americas will be discussed.

• Amazonia
• Pre-Columbian
• Inter-disciplinary
• Human-Environment interactions