Facing Change through Diversity: Resilience and Diversification of Plant Management Strategies during the Mid to Late Holocene Transition at the Monte Castelo Shellmound, SW Amazonia

Abstract

Recent advances in the archaeology of lowland South America are furthering our understanding of the Holocene development of plant cultivation and domestication, cultural niche construction, and relationships between environmental changes and cultural strategies of food production. This article offers new data on plant and landscape management and mobility in Southwestern Amazonia during a period of environmental change at the Middle to Late Holocene transition, based on archaeobotanical analysis of the Monte Castelo shellmound, occupied between 6000 and 650 yr BP and located in a modern, seasonally flooded savanna–forest mosaic. Through diachronic comparisons of carbonized plant remains, phytoliths, and starch grains, we construct an ecology of resource use and explore its implications for the long-term history of landscape formation, resource management practices, and mobility. We show how, despite important changes visible in the archaeological record of the shellmound during this period, there persisted an ancient, local, and resilient pattern of plant management which implies a degree of stability in both subsistence and settlement patterns over the last 6000 years. This pattern is characterized by management practices that relied on increasingly diversified, rather than intensive, food production systems. Our findings have important implications in debates regarding the history of settlement permanence, population growth, and carrying capacity in the Amazon basin.

Legacies of Indigenous land use and cultural burning in the Bolivian Amazon rainforest ecotone

“…The exploitation of a diverse range of cultivated, managed and wild species is similar to subsistence strategies documented for the past 6000 years at the nearby site of Monte Castello (MC, ca 40 km away) [4,117]. At MC, there is progressive land use diversification, rather than intensification through the Holocene [117]. However, at LV, the increase in land clearance, erosion, cultural burning, polyculture cultivation and the later formation of ADE soils associated with domestic spheres and ABE soils associated with crop cultivation [76] suggest that land use practices were both diversifying and intensifying during the Late Holocene.…”

“…The exploitation of a diverse range of cultivated, managed and wild species is similar to subsistence strategies documented for the past 6000 years at the nearby site of Monte Castello (MC, ca 40 km away) [4,117]. At MC, there is progressive land use diversification, rather than intensification through the Holocene [117].…”

“…The occurrence of maize pollen at LV after ca 5700 cal yr BP is consistent with a temporal gradient of maize dispersal that begins outside Amazonia and reaches the ARE after 7000 cal yr BP [64,104,110,114–116]. Earliest maize in the region appears ca 6850 cal yr BP in anthropic forest islands of the seasonally flooded savannahs to the southwest of Triunfo [3], Lake Rogaguado ca 6500 cal yr BP [104] and in the nearby Monte Castelo shell-mound ca 5300 cal yr BP [4,117].…”

Archaeobotany of Brazilian Indigenous Peoples and Their Food Plants

“…In Amazonia, fluvial shell mounds contain the earliest ceramic remains in South America, anthropic soils, and some of the oldest remains of cultivated plants. They are concentrated in three areas: (i) at the mouth of the Amazon River, on Marajó Island, and in coastal estuaries from present-day French Guiana to the state of Maranhão; (ii) in the region between the floodplains of the Amazon, Tapajós and Xingu rivers; and (iii) in the seasonally flooded savannas of southwestern Amazonia, between the Guaporé wetlands and the Bolivian Llanos de Mojos (Lombardo et al 2013;Hilbert et al 2017;Watling et al 2018;Furquim et al 2021).…”

“…), as well as palms, such as tucumã (Astrocaryum sp.) and moriche/ buriti (Furquim et al 2021). From ca.…”