The late Quaternary of the western Amazon: Climate, vegetation and humans

The Amazon rain-forest we know today is quite a recent phenomenon. New research on climate and vegetation changes from a series of cores in Ecuador provide a chronology for early agriculture and forest clearance from early Holocene times. What is offered here is the result of limited analyses of the Maxus palaeoenvironmental cores, in fact, primarily just one core. The results are indeed provocative. As more intensive studies of all of the Maxus cores are completed in the future, a wealth of detail should be forthcoming, which will confirm or possibly modify the present findings. Furthermore, this new data will expand our overall understanding of palaeoenvironmental conditions and human land use in the Western Amazon region. Thus, it is important that our inferences reflect region-wide patterns and not be based on just the observations from a single location. In part, of course, this is already being achieved with the other cited studies in the Western Amazon. Methodologically, this presentation demonstrates that wetland palaeoenvironmental cores in the Amazon rain-forest can provide significant data of interest not only to natural scientists, but also to archaeologists and anthropologists. Archaeologists are beginning to discover this fact in other areas of the world (e.g. tropical Pacific islands). There is no reason why archaeologists should not avail themselves of this technique in the vast Amazon region, when there is such a tremendous potential for it to contribute to the understanding of human adaptations to tropical rain-forest environments Palaeoenvironmental methods thereby may lead to advances in anthropological theory in way that would be difficult or impossible by more standard (i.e. archaeological site oriented) techniques.