This volume emerged from a 2016 World Archaeological Congress symposium designed “to illustrate how particular cases of South American archaeology have contributed to the understanding of a global research issue: human relations with their environments and landscapes during the past” (p. 2). The resulting 17 studies written by 43 scholars represent a continent-wide sample with global implications, incorporating “subdisciplines such as zooarchaeology, taphonomy, archaeobotany, and geoarchaeology that contribute data from various lines of evidence in the interpretation of archaeological sites and contexts” (p. 3). This brief review only hints at the breadth and depth of the contributions.
Several chapters are reviews at continental or macroregional scales. For example, Haas provides a valuable model of the development of sedentism, arguing that population growth and recursive mobility intersect and result in protracted occupations. Verano surveys past and current research on bioarchaeology in the Andes; his article will be much cited.
Other chapters, although focused on a specific region, have broad implications. Borrero and Martin summarize the late Pleistocene occupation of southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego at about 12,900 and 11,400 cal BP, documenting pioneering adaptations to the last continent inhabited in prehistory. Similarly, Méndez and Nuevo-Delaunay review 12 millennia of marine adaptations, focusing on a 40 km stretch of the coastal Chile containing some 400 archaeological sites; their analysis of 25 sites indicates five distinct modes of shellfish exploitation over time. Villagran and colleagues present micromorphological and spectroscopic analyses of the Middle Holocene Zapatero shell midden, located on the coast south of Antofagasta; they document a shift from shellfish to fish, with depositional continuities punctuated by brief hiatuses until the midden was reworked by a tsunami event at about 4000 cal yr BP.
On the opposite side of the continent, Belardi and colleagues present data from the Coyle River basin, a region of high arid steppe in southern Patagonia where extensive but low-intensity use of the region by mobile guanaco hunters was a stable strategy. In the western Pampa region 1,800 km to the north, Berón and colleagues document 9,000 years of hunter-gather adaptations to a region marked by scarce and scattered resources—fresh water, lithic resources, food resources, and minerals—where prehistoric “catastrophic or environmental stress situations” (p. 105) may have led to abandonments or new adaptations.
Other studies explore how precontact societies transformed South American landscapes. Rojas Mora and Montejo Gaitán present data from GIS, pollen, and soil studies of raised field agriculture in the Caribbean region of northern Colombia; their 76.5 km2 study area is a sample of a staggering 6,000 km2 of raised fields, “the largest [precontact] landscape modification in South America” (p. 187). Another study of an anthropogenic landscape is Giannotti's analysis of earthen mounds (cerritos de indios) as adaptations to floodplain environments in northeastern Uruguay. In Amazonia, Shock documents interactions between people and key resources, principally fruits, palms, and nuts (FNPs), observing that “groves of FNPs and their potential abundance were maintained by human behaviors over generations. And thus, they are the product of human decision” (p. 236).
Other regional overviews have implications that extend beyond their immediate study areas. In their excavations in the northern Ecuadorean highlands, Ugalde and Dyrdahl document the differential engagements of Formative (ca. 1500–500 cal BC) communities with craft production and exchange involving obsidian, Spondylus and other shellfish, and precious metals—findings significant for understanding coeval developments in Colombia and far northern Peru. Archila and colleagues present a theoretically subtle study of the Checua Valley in the Sabana de Bogotá that is focused on “the history of landscapes as sociocultural scenarios where the links between organisms in-their-environment involved an inseparable relationship between them and their lifeworlds,” a concept proposed by Tim Ingold (p. 16). Engaging with diverse archaeological signatures—settlements, dwellings, rock art, burials, clay sources, and salt springs—this research deserves wide attention.
Given the prominence of perspectivism in Amazonian ethnography, Bonomo and colleagues present a fascinating study of zoomorphic features on Goya-Malabrigo ceramics produced by societies occupying the middle and lower Paraná River from about 2000 BP to the early colonial period (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries). Of the 483 zoomorphic features, 399 could be identified to species, genus, family, or order. Two basic points emerged. Specific taxa were emphasized: the features were overwhelmingly of birds, with parrots prominent. Based on midden analyses, the animals portrayed were not eaten, suggesting a “taxonomy whereby some animals were consumed while others were depicted/protected/worshipped” (p. 438).
Not every chapter is successful. In their essay on hybridity that they refer to as “the concepts of mixing and transforming institutions, identities, and cultures” (p. 387), de Almeida and colleagues explore variations in material culture among Tupian groups in Amazonia. Although their research goals are unobjectionable—“studying the increasing interaction scale over social forms and information flow not only as a byproduct of migration processes, but also as a source of collective identity formation with premises beyond kinship” (p. 403)—the assumed correlations between pottery styles and social groups require further scrutiny.
In a deft and generous final essay, Tim Denham outlines parallel lines of archaeological research in South America and the Indo-Pacific region (his research area), in the process commenting on Tom Dillehay's contribution to the volume. Dillehay bemoans the limited impact that South American archaeology has had on global archaeology, contending that archaeologists working in other regions—particularly the “Old World”—consider South American archaeologists as “generally too ‘provincial,’ ‘myopic’, and too infrequently relate their findings to global theoretical and comparative issues” (p. 322). There is truth in this comment, but I was reminded of a presentation I gave once in the United Kingdom to a room of highly educated academics: they were stunned to learn that the Amazon River drains a region the size of Europe. Parochialism is global. South American Contributions to World Archaeology will help remedy this.
