ANTHROPOGENIC FOREST ISLANDS FROM SOUTHWESTERN AMAZONIA
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-01-17

Full title: ANTHROPOGENIC FOREST ISLANDS FROM SOUTHWESTERN AMAZONIA: 10,000 YEARS OF PEOPLING AND LANDSCAPE ANTHROPIZATION

The Llanos de Moxos, in southwestern Amazonia, has an impressive archaeological landscape where the main manifestations are late Holocene earthworks such as monumental mounds, agricultural raised fields, canals and causeways. The region is also dotted with hundreds of the so-called “forest islands”. Recent research demonstrated that some of these forest islands are prehistoric artificial mounds made by early to mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers and then re-occupied by agriculturalist populations of the late Holocene. These “islands” are mainly distributed along the margins of rivers and palaeorivers, and in some cases they are associated to raised fields and water management earthworks. However, very little is currently known about how many of them are of actual anthropic origin, their general chronology and the societies that built them. Understanding such issues is key to better comprehend the dynamics of South America peopling and to infer the degree of land use and landscape anthropization of southwestern Amazonia during several thousands of years as a result of the economic and cultural activities of several generations of people. In this paper, we illustrate the results of our project carried out in the Barba Azul Nature Rerserve (Beni, Bolivia), where we surveyed 19 forest islands and excavated one of them, and we analysed archaeological and sedimentological materials.


Ruiz-Pérez, Javier - Lombardo, Umberto (CaSEs Research Group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra) - Fernández Seláez, Geraldine Paloma (Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés) - Ortega Barboza, Luís Miguel (Asociación Armonía) - Madella, Marco (ICREA)