The Call of the Wild: Rethinking Food Production in Ancient Amazonia

Posted: 1 Nov 2019

See all articles by Eduardo G. Neves

Eduardo G. Neves

University of São Paulo (USP)

Michael Heckenberger

University of Florida

Date Written: October 2019

Abstract

The Amazon basin is accepted as an independent center of plant domestication in the world. A variety of important plants were domesticated in the Amazon and its surroundings; however, the majority of plants cultivated today in the Amazon are not domesticated, if this descriptor is understood to convey substantial genetic and phenotypic divergence from wild varieties or species. Rather, many domesticates are trees and tubers that occupy an intermediate stage between wild and domesticated, which seems to be a prevailing pattern since at least the middle Holocene, 6,000 years ago. Likewise, basin-wide inventories of trees show a remarkable pattern where a few species, called hyperdominant, are overrepresented in the record, including many varieties that are economically and symbolically important to traditional societies. Cultivation practices among indigenous groups in the Amazon are embedded in other dimensions of meaning that go beyond subsistence, and such entanglement between nature and culture has long been noticed at the conceptual level by anthropologists. This principle manifests itself in ancient and dynamic practices of landscape construction and transformation, which are seriously threatened today by the risks posed by economic development and climate change to Amazonian traditional societies and biomes.

Suggested Citation

Neves, Eduardo G. and Heckenberger, Michael, The Call of the Wild: Rethinking Food Production in Ancient Amazonia (October 2019). Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 48, pp. 371-388, 2019, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3475842 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102218-011057

Eduardo G. Neves

University of São Paulo (USP) ( email )

Rua Luciano Gualberto, 315
São Paulo, São Paulo 14800-901
Brazil

Michael Heckenberger (Contact Author)

University of Florida ( email )

PO Box 117165, 201 Stuzin Hall
Gainesville, FL 32610-0496
United States

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