A Paleoindian campsite has been uncovered in stratified prehistoric deposits in Caverna da Pedra Pintada at Monte Alegre in the Brazilian Amazon. Fifty-six radiocarbon dates on carbonized plant remains and 13 luminescence dates on lithics and sediment indicate a late Pleistocene age contemporary with North American Paleoindians. Paintings, triangular bifacial spear points, and other tools in the cave document a culture distinct from North American cultures. Carbonized tree fruits and wood and faunal remains reveal a broad-spectrum economy of humid tropical forest and riverine foraging. The existence of this and related cultures east of the Andes changes understanding of the migrations and ecological adaptations of early foragers.

The earliest pottery yet found in the Western Hemisphere has been excavated from a prehistoric shell midden near Santarém in the lower Amazon, Brazil. Calibrated accelerator radiocarbon dates on charcoal, shell, and pottery and a thermoluminescence date on pottery from the site fall from about 8000 to 7000 years before the present. The early fishing village is part of a long prehistoric trajectory that contradicts theories that resource poverty limited cultural evolution in the tropics.

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Early research in Amazonia suggested the possibility that prehistoric complex societies had developed in several regions, despite assumptions that humid tropical conditions would prevent such developments. Under the rubric of cultural ecology, various processes have been hypothesized for the development of these societies: invasion and subsequent devolution of groups from expanding states in temperate regions outside Amazonia, social and ecological interactions among regions within Amazonia, and social adaptation to local ecological variation. The hypotheses differ, but researchers generally employed ecological determinist and functionalist assumptions of causality: from environment to subsistence and population and thence to social adaptation. Recent thinking on complex society has distilled the concept of heterarchy as an alternative to cultural materialist explanations for the processes of formation and functioning of a range of complex societies. This chapter examines the accumulated data on complex societies in two Amazonian regions-Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon and the Santarem-Monte Alegre region in the Lower Amazon-in light of the theoretical issues about the formation and functioning of complex societies worldwide. Results of the comparison tend to accord more with heterarchical hypotheses than with the earlier cultural ecological hypotheses. In Amazonia, non-state societies appear to have organized large, dense populations, intensive subsistence adaptations, large systems of earthworks, production of elaborate artworks and architecture for considerable periods of time. The more centralized and hierarchical of these societies had developed more ritual and material culture related to conflict, and had a heavier impact on their environments. The patterns of social development in Amazonia can still be causally related to environmental patterns through cultural ecological theory, but the new data suggests the need to envision a more mutualistic, variable, and complex causal nexus. PARADIGMS FOR PREEVDUSTRIAL SOCIAL COMPLEXITYAmazonia has relevance for theories of complex societies. Theorists have related the process of social evolution in Amazonia in different ways to factors of environment, economy, population, ritual, and social context () at a time when there were little or no relevant archaeological data. Data on the interaction of such factors in the indigenous occupation of this region, therefore, can shed light on the origins and nature of complex human communities. This chapter, therefore, outlines Amazonian cultural ecology and culture history in relation to general theory of complex societies.