Historical ecologists working in the Neotropics argue that the present natural environment is an historical product of human intentionality and ingenuity, a creation that is imposed, built, managed and maintained by the collective multigenerational knowledge and experience of Native Americans. In the past 12,000 years, indigenous peoples transformed the environment, creating what we now recognize as the rich ecological mosaic of the Neotropics. The prehispanic savanna peoples of the Bolivian Amazon built an anthropogenic landscape through the construction of raised fields, large settlement mounds, and earthen causeways. I have studied a complex artificial network of hydraulic earthworks covering 525 km2 in the Baures region of Bolivia. Here I identify a particular form of earthwork, the zigzag structure, as a fish weir, on the basis of form, orientation, location, association with other hydraulic works and ethnographic analogy. The native peoples used this technology to harvest sufficient animal protein to sustain large and dense populations in a savanna environment.

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IS A comprehensive concept in anthropology referring to the cultural and genetic control of plants and animals and the processes of adopting farming and living in permanent settlements. Native Amazonians domesticated and cultivated a variety of crops (but few animal species) many millennia before the arrival of Europeans. In this chapter, I explore a simple hypothesis: that Amazonian peoples of the past invested more energy in domesticating entire landscapes than in domesticating individual plant and animal species. Through landscape engineering and the use of simple technology such as fire, the past inhabitants "domesticated" the forest, savanna, soil, and water of the Bolivian Amazon, which had profound implications for availability of game animals, economically useful plants, overall biomass, and regional biodiversity. Because the signatures of human activity and engineering are physically embedded in the landscape, archaeology can playa major role in studying these phenomena. The pre-Columbian peoples of the Bolivian Amazon built raised agricultural fields, practiced sophisticated water-management techniques, and lived in large, well-organized communities millennia before European contact. They rearranged soils, altered drainage, constructed earthworks, made marginal lands productive, and in some cases may have increased local biodiversity.Two themes that are now recognized as myths-one of a pristine environment and the other of the ecologically noble savage-have long dominated the popular and scientific literature on Amazonia. The myth of the pristine environment is the belief that the Americas consisted largely of undisturbed nature before the arrival of Europeans, who subsequently destroyed the environment with their agriculture, mining, and city building. The myth of the ecologically noble savage is the idea that past and present indigenous peoples always existed in harmony with this undisturbed nature. In both myths, nature 236 CLARK L. ERICKSON is imagined as being in a state of perpetual equilibrium with old, undisturbed forests as the ideal form.Environments portrayed as being in this pristine state are often those with low populations of native peoples practicing "traditional" lifeways. Most or much ofAmazonia was considered such a place. In the past few decades, however, research has shown that this state was recently created and not the product of timeless harmonies. Indeed, much of what has been viewed as "pristine wilderness" in the Amazon is the indirect result of massive depopulation after the arrival of Europeans. Within a century, Old World diseases, slavery, rnissionization, resettlement, and wars eliminated the great majority of the indigenous inhabitants from these landscapes. As a whole, Amazonia did not return to its sixteenth-century population level until the twentieth century. Historical ecologists have shown that before that depopulation occurred, native peoples directly determined much ofAmazonia's environmental structure and content. Thus, present-day Amazonian landscapes were sha...

Although the Neotropics are recognized as a region rich in biological diversity, the origin, evolution, and maintenance of this phenomenon continues to be debated. Historical ecologists and landscape archaeologists point out that the Neotropics have a long, complex human history that may have been a key factor in the creation, shaping, and management of present day biodiversity. The construction of monumental earthworks referred to as ring ditches of the Bolivian Amazon and surrounding regions in late prehistory had considerable impact on the fauna, flora, soils, and topography of forest islands. Patterned landscape features, historical documents, energetics, and historical ecology are used to understand the transformation of forest islands into anthropogenic built environments

In early anthropology, environmental determinism was used to explain race, human demography, material culture, cultural variation and cultural change. As anthropological interpretation evolved, simplistic reductionist thinking was replaced with more complex socio-cultural explanations. Despite these theoretical advances,environmental determinism continues to be invoked to explain Andean prehistory.