The tropical lowlands of South America were long thought of as a “counterfeit paradise,” a vast expanse of mostly pristine rainforests with poor soils for farming, limited protein resources, and environmental conditions inimical to the endogenous development of hierarchical human societies. These misconceptions derived largely from a fundamental misunderstanding of the unique characteristics of ancient and indigenous farming and environmental management in lowland South America, which are in turn closely related to the cultural baggage surrounding the term “agriculture.”
Archaeological and archaeobotanical discoveries made in the early 21st century have overturned these misconceptions and revealed the true nature of the ancient and traditional food production systems of lowland South America, which involve a complex combination of horticulture, agroforestry, and the management of non-domesticated or incipiently domesticated species in cultural forest landscapes. In this sense, lowland South America breaks the mould of the Old World “farming hypothesis” by revealing cultivation without domestication and domestication without agriculture, a syndrome that has been referred to as “anti-domestication”. These discoveries have contributed to a better understanding of the cultural history of South America, while also suggesting new paradigms of environmental management and food production for the future of this critical and threatened biome.
There was no agriculture . . . in the Americas until the Europeans arrived with their production system, which originated in the fields of the Middle East.
(Clement et al., 2012, p. 17)
The diversity of food production systems found in pre-Columbian South America presents a challenge to Old World understandings of agriculture. The term “agriculture” can be used generically to refer to food production of all kinds, including animal husbandry. But in the archaeological literature on the origins of agriculture in the Fertile Crescent, the term refers more specifically to the intensive cropping of staple grains in heavily managed, single-species fields, or ager, a productive space indelibly associated with the etymology of the term (Leach, 1997). Agriculture in this sense [ager (field) and cultura (art of cultivation)] was absent in lowland South America, indeed throughout the Americas, until the European conquest (Clement et al., 2012). Food production in lowland South America was much more diverse, including both horticulture [hortus (garden), cultura] and arboriculture [arbor (tree) and cultura], though combinations of these types were more common than pure examples of one or the other. Horticulture conveys a form of more diversified food production, often vegetables and tubers, which takes place in the less regimented space of the garden, or hortus. Arboriculture can take place in house gardens and orchards, garden fallows, and mature secondary forest.
The single factor that most differentiates these production systems from agriculture is that both horticulture and arboriculture are concerned with managing individual plants, whereas in agriculture, it is entire plant populations that are managed. Moreover, indigenous management of anthropogenic forest landscapes as a form of food production in lowland South America represents the domestication, not only of individual plants or populations, but rather of entire landscapes, which contain domesticated as well as non-domesticated species. For these reasons, and despite the prominence of the term in the title of this article, the decision has been made to avoid the term “agriculture” throughout the rest of the article, preferring more neutral concepts such as “cultivation,” farming” and “food production” (see Rindos, 1984; Harris, 1996; Smith, 2001).
The monolithic concept of agriculture and its association with Old World models concerning the rise of ancient “civilizations” is precisely the basis of the many misconceptions about lowland South American cultural history this article hopes to correct. These misconceptions contributed to a misreading or outright disregard for the archaeological record: why excavate in a region where organic remains supposedly do not preserve, and where there were no complex, hierarchical state societies (i.e., “civilizations”) to begin with? In the standard evolutionary chronology, hunter-gatherers throughout the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere in Eurasia began experimenting with crop and animal domestication in the early Holocene. During the so-called Neolithic revolution, farmers invested increasingly (and irreversibly) in agricultural livelihoods, and as the saying goes, the rest is history. In the New World, and the South American lowlands in particular, the relationship between domestication, food production, and cultural development does not follow the Old World pattern. As Neves (2016) summed up the situation, “There is no Neolithic south of the Equator.”
Only in the late 20th century did a growing cadre of archaeologists, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, and environmental historians begin to uncover evidence in some parts of Amazonia of societies who modified their landscapes through farming and environmental management techniques seldom witnessed in the historical or ethnographic record. Ethnographic, archaeological, and ethnobotanical research also revealed the importance of many non-domesticated (or not fully domesticated) plant species to Amazonian and lowland South American livelihoods, a syndrome that has been referred to as “anti-domestication” (Lemes & Aparício, 2018; Aparício, 2019, p. 108; Carneiro da Cunha, 2019), challenging mainstream views on the necessary link between domestication, farming, and cultural development. Linguistic research has likewise revealed patterns of multiple, parallel linguistic expansions in lowland South America that challenge the prevailing view of the “farming-language dispersal hypothesis” explaining monodominant linguistic expansions elsewhere in the world.
The conventional wisdom on lowland South American cultural and environmental history was summarized in Meggers’s (1971) book Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise. Meggers considered Amazonia to be a “counterfeit paradise” because, despite its lush forests and rich biodiversity, it contained relatively poor soils and dispersed protein resources. These environmental conditions supposedly limited food production potential, population density and political hierarchy of Indigenous lowland South American peoples, especially in the interfluvial areas, from ancient times through to the present (Meggers, 1954). Lowland South American peoples, according to Meggers, settled away from the alluvial floodplains of the major rivers. They lived in relatively small, egalitarian societies with a semi-nomadic lifestyle and numerous cultural adaptations, such as witchcraft beliefs, endemic warfare and cultural controls on fertility and natality, in order to avoid excessive population growth that would outstrip the limited protein resources and low-productivity soils (Gross, 1975). Early reports by 17th-century explorers provided a few accounts of larger, sedentary, stratified societies along the margins of larger rivers. Some dismissed such accounts altogether as mere hyperbole by imaginative explorers eager to impress their kings, while others took them to be the exception that proved the rule: Only along the major river floodplains, with abundant fish resources and rich, annually replenished alluvial soils, could Amazonian societies achieve the resource productivity required to develop more hierarchical kinds of society (Lathrap, 1970; Meggers, 1971). Even then, these floodplain societies developed only to the political level of “chiefdoms,” a rung below on the ladder of social evolution from the state-based “civilizations” found elsewhere on the continent and in the world.
According to this view, ancient lowland peoples, like those observed ethnographically, would not typically have developed sophisticated ceramic traditions or other art forms, nor left behind major constructions or other alterations in what appeared to be a rather pristine rainforest landscape. Meggers’s own archaeological studies from Marajó Island in the Amazon River estuary revealed a complex ceramic tradition with elaborate decorations and clear evidence of social hierarchy and craft specialization. Yet in her view, such advanced cultural innovations could not have been endogenous to lowland peoples, and hence must have resulted from cultural contact with Andean and Pacific coastal societies far to the west (Meggers, 1997). Pre-Columbian Amazonia was understood by Meggers, and the mainstream of archaeologists, anthropologists and cultural ecologists for most of the second half of the 20th century , as a backwater to the social and political developments going on elsewhere on the continent, a “green Hell” incapable of supporting the hierarchical state societies found in the Andes and Mesoamerica.
Meggers’s view of South American subsistence patterns and cultural evolution closely followed the model laid out by Steward (1948) in the Handbook of South American Indians. Steward identified four general cultural areas for South America, which also comprised a scheme of economic and social complexity and cultural evolution. The “marginal tribes” consisted of hunter-gatherer bands with little or no reliance on cultivated crops; “tropical forest tribes” consisted of small-scale hunters, fishers, and horticulturalists, such as those observed ethnographically in the Amazonian lowlands; the “circum-Caribbean tribes” were organized into hierarchical political structures known as chiefdoms; but only the “Andean civilizations” in the highlands and coastal areas had sufficient food productivity to develop state-level societies. Because there was vanishingly little archaeological evidence available from lowland South America at the time, and since micro-botanical analyses and other techniques for directly identifying plant remains from archaeological contexts were not yet available, mid- to late- 20th-century understandings of Pre-Columbian food production in the Amazonian lowlands were drawn by analogy from contemporary Indigenous societies observed by ethnographers and explorers.
These “tropical forest tribes” were observed to practice shifting cultivation, known as swidden-fallow or “slash-and-burn” farming, by clearing and burning small openings in the forest for planting crops. Such clearings rarely exceeded a few hectares and were only cultivated for a few years before fertility declined and secondary growth from the surrounding forests took over the swiddens. These grew back rather quickly into secondary forests that could only be cut and burned for cultivation once again after a long fallow period. All of these factors—low soil fertility, long fallow periods, dispersed protein resources—were thought to underlie the cultural and ecological adaptations observed among tropical forest tribes in the present, and supposedly limited the evolution of sociocultural complexity in these regions since pre-colonial times.
Given Steward’s classification scheme and Meggers’s theories on the role of resource limitations on cultural evolution in the South American lowlands, numerous ecological anthropologists throughout the 1970s and 1980s carried out quantitative and ethnographic studies of Amazonian farming, hunting, and ethnobotanical and ethnozoological knowledge (Behrens, 1986; Berlin & Berlin, 1977; Boster, 1984; Carneiro, 1974, 1978; Carneiro, 1970; Chagnon & Hames, 1979; Gross, 1975; Hames, 1980; Hill & Hawkes, 1983; Johnson, 1983; Descola, 1986; Posey & Balée, 1989; Vickers, 1976; Vickers & Plowman, 1984).
Despite the relatively small areas opened for cultivation by Amazonian peoples, their food production repertoire includes a large number of crops, as well as an extraordinary diversity of agricultural varieties of major staple crops, especially manioc, with hundreds of varieties documented in different regions across lowland South America (Boster, 1984; Emperaire & Eloy, 2008; Heckler & Zent, 2008; Salick, Cellinese, & Knapp, 1997). The two main groups of varieties are “bitter manioc,” containing toxic amounts of cyanide that requires processing before consumption (Figure 1), and “sweet manioc” that can be eaten after simple boiling. Bitter manioc is found especially in the central and eastern part of the Amazon and is associated with an extensive repertoire of vegetable fibre basketry used for detoxification (see Shepard et al., 2004), while sweet manioc is associated more with western Amazonia.
Figure 1. Bitter manioc is harvested from a swidden garden on the upper Rio Negro (top left) and brought back to the household for processing (top right). Cyanide-containing bitter manioc is peeled (bottom left), grated, pressed, and sieved to remove water-soluble toxins using an extensive technology of baskets made of Ischnosiphon (Marantaceae) and other plant fibers (see Shepard et al., 2004). Different weaves and specific basketry types are associated with different steps of the process (bottom right), notably the tipiti (center of photo), a cylindrical basket that squeezes out liquids as it elongates.
Source: G. H. Shepard Jr.Viewing Amazonia as a cultural hinterland, Meggers assumed that domesticated plants, like the elaborate archaeological ceramics found in some parts of Amazonia, represented imports obtained from cultural exchange with the Andes or Mesoamerica. Plant domestication and the emergence of sedentary societies has been considered the key to understanding the evolution and demographic expansion of human societies in Europe, Africa, and Asia, from hunter-gatherer bands, passing through the Neolithic revolution, leading ultimately to the stratified state societies commonly referred to as civilizations (Bellwood, 2005; Childe, 1957). This focus on farming as a key to understanding cultural evolution and demographic expansion is a hallmark of 20th-century studies of indigenous lowland South America, beginning with Max Schmidt’s (1917) classic work on the Arawak peoples.
The so-called farming hypothesis of language dispersal, combining historical linguistics and archaeological data (Bellwood & Renfrew, 2002) influenced models for understanding the dispersal of peoples, languages, domesticated crops, and ceramic styles in lowland South America (Lathrap, 1970; Heckenberger, Neves, & Peterson, 1998; Neves, 2011). Focusing on the contrast between root crop horticulture and more intensive seed-based agriculture, Anna Roosevelt hypothesized that it was the arrival and intensification of maize production from Mesoamerica that permitted the growth of chiefdoms in some parts of the lower Amazon and Orinoco beginning in the 1st century ad , while manioc horticulturalists elsewhere retained the smaller, less complex “tropical forest tribe” formation (Roosevelt, 1980).
Lathrap (1970) was the first archaeologist to contest the persistent view of the Amazonian lowlands as a cultural backwater in South America. Based on his own excavations in western Amazonia and interpretations of literature data on ceramic traditions, centers of crop cultivation and cultural and linguistic patterns, he proposed that central Amazonia was in fact an ancient center of cultural innovations including ceramics and crop domestication. For Lathrap (1973), these innovations would have provided the motor for significant demographic expansion of the “tropical forest tribes” beginning some 4,000 years ago. Lathrap was a pioneer in associating the distribution of widespread language families, such as Tupian and Arawakan, with such ancient processes of demographic expansion. Inverting the conventional wisdom on the direction of cultural influences from the Andes to Amazonia, Lathrap saw in the rich, lowland tropical iconography found at Chavín de Huantar—an important formative archaeological site for Andean civilizations dating to about 3,500 years ago—evidence of ancient cultural influences flowing from Amazonia up into the Andes (Lathrap, 1971). Lathrap pointed out the differences between the richer, more productive and accessible floodplain environments as opposed to the relatively poorer soils of inaccessible interfluvial areas as being a major determining factor influencing cultural history in Amazonia. Floodplain environments boasted both more fertile, continually renewed sedimentary soils, as well as higher concentrations of aquatic protein sources, providing an endogenous subsistence base for the stratified societies observed archaeologically in the lower Amazon, and witnessed by some early explorers. These hierarchical societies would have developed of their own accord without cultural influences from the Andes.
Denevan (1992) was the first to question the analogy made between ancient farming practices and those observed among modern indigenous peoples in lowland South America. Most contemporary indigenous peoples observed by ethnographers during the 20th century , even the most remote, had access to steel axes through extensive trading networks. It was the steel axe, not some enduring legacy of “tropical forest” culture, that shaped the shifting, long-fallow swidden farming systems of contemporary lowland peoples. Prior to the arrival of steel axes, ancient indigenous peoples using stone axes would have had to practice a very different kind of cultivation. Unable to cut down large, hard trees in high forest like contemporary peoples do with steel axes, ancient peoples would have had to invest in more intensive efforts to create semi-permanent clearings using stone axes and fire in small clearings created by tree falls or somewhat larger clearings created by wind squalls (Denevan, 1992, 1998, 2001, 2006).
Anthropological studies of indigenous farming and hunting likewise brought into question the long-held view regarding environmental limitations on lowland South American cultural evolution. Carneiro’s (1974) study of Kuikuru farming along the upper Xingu River found no evidence for soil fertility as a significant limiting factor for food production in Amazonia, since indigenous peoples produced significant surplus food while generally under-utilizing the full potential of their gardens. Since farming per se no longer seemed to provide a significant limitation on indigenous cultural evolution, a group of researchers inspired by Lathrap’s suggestions regarding protein sources in interfluvial versus floodplain areas began investigating the possible role of animal protein for differential cultural development in Amazonia (Gross, 1975; Werner, 1983). The key observation is that staple food products such as manioc and other tubers in Amazonia provide very little protein; hence, the hypothesis was that protein for human populations would have to come principally from animal sources, both terrestrial and aquatic.
Ultimately, the so-called protein debate turned out to be largely spurious, since protein from aquatic animals, terrestrial game and even vegetable sources turned out to be far more abundant than originally estimated (Beckerman, 1979). The ongoing toll of introduced diseases and aggressive European conquest, more than inherent environmental limitations, has shaped the social formations and subsistence strategies of indigenous populations that persisted through modern times (Beckerman, 1979). Moreover, recent archaeology has demonstrated far more densely settled societies in prehistoric times than those observed in the ethnographic record (Denevan, 1976; Heckenberger et al., 2008; Heckenberger & Neves, 2009).
Perhaps the main reason that early-to-mid- 20th-century archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnobotanists were unable to identify the abundance of food production in Amazonia is that they were looking for agriculture. Moraes (2015) called this view “agricultural determinism.” Archaeologists working in the Americas as well as in Eurasia have questioned the dualistic epistemology inherent in the presumed divide between foraging and farming societies (Bogucki, 1995), calling greater attention to the “middle ground” of food production involving both domesticated and non-domesticated species (Smith, 2001). Domestication, once seen as the hallmark of agricultural societies, came to be understood with more nuance, generating a proliferation of sub-types and gradations (Rindos, 1984; Harris, 1996; Clement et al., 2012).
Food production in Amazonia starts in the homegarden around the long house or village, expands into small, intensively managed swidden gardens nearby, then extends further into agroforests and finally into forests managed for numerous food and other useful species (Lins et al., 2015; Clement & Cassino, 2018; Denevan, 2001; Stahl, 2015). Importantly, the landscape around a village is a mosaic of swiddens, small agroforests and sections of managed forests across the landscape, including clearings opened after tree falls or wind squalls that can be exploited for planting (Denevan, 2006). This continuum of food production within a landscape mosaic can be viewed as a continuum of more intensive cultivation in homegardens and nearby swiddens, to agroforestry management in surrounding mixed swidden-forest areas, to more diffuse management of anthropogenic forest landscapes. But it can also be understood as a continuum from more domesticated crops in homegardens and nearby swiddens to semi-domesticated crops in agroforests to incipiently domesticated crops and wild species in managed forests. Only more intensive farming with domesticated crops in home gardens and swiddens is easily identified by archaeologists (Stahl, 2015), while agroforests and managed forests require other academic specialties and methods, including floristic inventories by botanists and ecologists, and interviews by anthropologists and ethnobotanists, to reveal their human legacy (Clement & Cassino, 2018; Levis et al., 2017; Lins et al., 2015; Moraes et al., 2019; Shepard & Ramirez, 2011).
Complementing such resource-based approaches, social anthropological research among Amazonian peoples has focused on how relationships among people, plants and landscapes in Amazonia derive from indigenous cosmological and ontological concepts. Kinship categories such as consanguinity and affinity can be used to understand discourse and practices surrounding cultivated plants (Descola, 1986; Mendes dos Santos, 2016). Some indigenous Amazonian peoples understand the forest to be a kind of homegarden managed by various non-human agents or “owners”, who must be consulted when using these spaces or the resources they harbour. Thus, the garden-forest continuum involves not only different kinds of resources and human actions, but also depends on the intentions and agency of non-human actors as well (Daly & Shepard, 2019; Descola, 2016; Oliveira, 2016).
[Michael] Heckenberger said that everywhere in the Kuikuru village ‘you can see the past in the present.’ I began to picture the flutists and dancers in one of the old plazas . . . crossing moats and passing through tall palisade fences, moving from one village to the next along wide boulevards and bridges and causeways . . . For a moment, I could see this vanished world as if it were right in front of me. Z.
(Grann, 2009, p. 277)
As archaeological surveys and long-term excavations were carried out in various regions of Amazonia beginning around the turn of the 21st century , a growing body of evidence revealed that some parts of the Amazon basin and Guianas supported pre-Columbian populations living at much higher densities and in significantly more hierarchical societies than those observed ethnographically (Denevan, 1976; Heckenberger & Neves, 2009; Heckenberger et al., 2008; Hemming, 2008). Archaeologists have found evidence for large, sedentary settlements that practiced intensive food production, invested in major earthworks and modified their environments both directly and indirectly. Yet within a couple of centuries after the arrival of Europeans, such lowland civilizations were all but erased, surviving only in the accounts of the earliest European explorers, and in the enduring legacy they have left in Amazonian landscapes (Arroyo-Kalin, 2008; Balée, 1989; Shepard & Ramirez, 2011).
Ancient peoples of the upper Xingu River created a complex network of causeways connecting multiple villages according to a highly symmetrical “galactic” pattern. Vast earthworks involved the cooperation of hundreds, perhaps thousands of people, which would only be possible with a stratified social system, echoes of which of are still visible in the hereditary chiefdoms of modern Xinguano peoples (Heckenberger, 2005). Earthworks, still visible to this day, provided transportation routes, public and ritual spaces, as well as aquaculture ponds and farming land. Working closely with the Kuikuru people, archaeologist Michael Heckenberger has mapped these extensive earthworks, and suggests the “galactic clusters” of ancient Xinguano settlements consisted of garden cities that may have attained the population size of ancient Greek polities (Heckenberger et al., 2008).
Deforestation in the Brazilian state of Acre in the early 2000s revealed hundreds of previously unknown geometrical earthworks, called geoglyphs (Schaan, 2016), including ring villages connected by linear roads (Watling et al., 2017). The societies who built these structures were never encountered by European colonists, and the function, origin, and mode of construction of these earthworks is as yet unknown (Virtanen & Saunaluoma, 2017). A series of mounds along the Guyanese coast, once thought to be natural formations, turned out, upon archaeological investigation, to be the result of a complex system of raised bed farming that had already fallen into disuse before European colonists arrived (Rostain, 2008, 2016). Ancient peoples of the Llanos de Mojos in Bolivia also created extensive earthworks involved in the irrigation of this vast flatlands (Erickson, 2006), as well as monumental mounds occupied continuously for centuries (Prümmers & Jaimes Betancourt, 2014), and yet there is no ethnographic or historical record of how these people lived.
These examples could be compared with field-based agricultural systems found in other parts of the world. However, in the case of the Bolivian Llanos, micro-botanical analysis suggests “inter-field variation and that the fields were not exclusively mono-cropped” (Whitney et al., 2014, p. 238). Studies of the ancient farming mounds in French Guyana likewise found a great diversity of plant phytoliths. Despite the clear importance of maize cultivation, a number of other plants, including palm trees, fruit trees, technological, medicinal, and psychoactive plants, were also found on the same raised beds (Iriarte & Dickau, 2012). Moreover, these raised beds also appear to have involved the management of as many as 35 genera of aquatic fauna (Prestes-Carneiro, Béarez, Shock, Prümers, & Jaimes Betancourt, 2019). In the case of the ancient mound-building peoples of Marajó Island, Schaan (2008) suggested that aquatic fauna management would have been the main intention of human settlements in this seasonally flooded area.
The emergence of phytolith analysis and other more sophisticated methods for identifying plant remains in tropical soils have allowed researchers to investigate the origins and evolution of lowland South American food production much more directly than was previously possible (Watling et al., 2018). One of the biggest surprises has been a relative paucity of evidence for the predominant role of manioc as a staple food in ancient Amazonian diets (Fausto & Neves, 2019). Manioc cultivation, it would seem, became a much more dominant staple food only in colonial times, perhaps due to the introduction of steel axes and the innovation of slash-and-burn farming, as pointed out by Denevan (1992). Ancient Amazonian food production appears to have included a much more diverse array of plants, including fully domesticated, incipiently domesticated, and semi-domesticated species, as well as non-domesticated species managed in agroforestry systems (Clement, 1999; Clement, Borém, & Lopes, 2012).
Clement (1999) documented 138 species of domesticated food crops cultivated by Amazonian peoples at the time of first European contact, mostly native species (see Tables 1–3) but also including many species from other parts of South America and Mesoamerica. Among the most significant crops are manioc (Manihot esculenta), maize (Zea mays), sweet potato (Ipomea batatas), yam (Dioscorea trifida), cocoyam (Xanthosoma saggitifolium), peach palm (Bactris gasipaes), cacao (Theobroma cacao), chili peppers (Capsicum spp.), squash (Cucurbita spp.), pineapple (Ananas comosus), papaya (Carica papaya), peanut (Arachis hypogea), avocado (Persea americana), cashew (Anacardium occidentale), guava (Psidium guajava), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), calabash (Crescentia cujete), annatto (Bixa orellana), common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), and many others.
