Early inhabitants of the Amazonian tropical rain forest: A study of humans and environmental dynamics

Prior to the 60's Hunter-Gatherers in tropical forest ecosystems were considered as unmodified representatives of early tropical forest adaptive strategy. Their way of life was somewhere between the incipient slash-and-burn agriculturists and the rudimentary Stone Age populations. This view was challenged in 1968 when D. Lathrap (1968) proposed that tropical forest hunter-gatherers were descendants of unsuccessful tropical forest cultures that could not maintain their sociopolitical level due to resource competition with other populations. Groups forced into environments unsuitable to intensive agriculture suffered significant population loss and adapted to a more mobile existence. One logical extension of Lathrap's argument is that tropical forest hunter-gatherers are uninteresting in terms of their long history and that their recent history can be understood in relation to the control of resources by farmers. This led anthropologists to focus on farming adaptations with strong emphasis on resource availability (Meggers 1954; Meggers and Evans 1983; Myers 1988; Lathrap 1970).;Recently some researchers (Headland 1986; Headland and Reid 1989, Bailey et al 1989, Bailey and Headland 1991, Sponsel 1989) have proposed that hunter-gatherers adaptation to tropical forest ecosystems prior to the introduction or development of agriculture was impossible due to carbohydrate deficiencies. Ethnographic data recovered in different tropical regions illustrates this dependency (Milton 1984; Peterson 1978a, 1978b, Politis and Rodriguez 1994, Silverwood-Cope 1972). However, Headland and Bailey's hypothesis is based on a model that does not consider the high variability of adaptations among huntergatherers while assumed the equivalence between the ethnographic present and the archaeological past adaptations.;This text encompasses detailed archaeological information of one early site in Amazonia: Pena Roja. Pena Roja is the most fully documented archaeological site dealing with information belonging to the late Pleistocene and early Holocene in Amazonia. The paleoenvironmental and archaeological data recovered in this site, and in the middle Caqueta River show a human population inhabiting a tropical rain forest before the introduction or development of agriculture. Consequently, Pena Roja's data allows us to evaluate the carbohydrate deficiency hypothesis from an archaeological perspective while contributes to the development of new directions in the interpretation and understanding of landscape evolution.