Indigeneity of Past Landscape Transformations of the Tropics

Abstract

Indigeneity is the living heritage of traditional peoples. It includes not only their languages and cultures but their transformational etchings on landscapes—not just alterations in the form of inanimate structural changes of the substrate, as in the construction of earthworks and edifices, but sometimes changing the composition of the living flora and fauna. Archaeology is crucial to the identification of indigeneity in the past and in the analysis of landscapes and seascapes associated with it. Landscape transformations, from the perspective of historical ecology, refer to the turnover in species of given locales because of human-mediated disturbance. Primary landscape transformation denotes complete species turnover, whereas secondary landscape transformation denotes partial species turnover. In both cases, substrate alterations occur, but in primary landscape transformation these are qualitatively more profound. In order to understand landscape transformations, we might begin with consideration of geographer Carl Sauer’s comment (1963 [1925]: 333) that ‘We cannot form an idea of landscape except in terms of its time relations as well as of its space relations. It is in continuous process of development or of dissolution and replacement.’ Indigeneity is one of the factors involved in dissolution and replacement, which I refer to as ‘transformation’. Landscapes created in the past through mechanisms rooted in indigeneity are often called the ‘built environment’ by archaeologists. In many tropical forests, including those of Greater Amazonia, the Atlantic Coastal Forest, West Africa, Central Africa, Malesia, and Micronesia, both primary and secondary landscape transformations have noticeably affected the distribution of plant and animal species. In some cases, with specific reference to primary landscape transformation, entire forests came into existence, such as in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia and in Guinea, West Africa (see Fairhead, Chapter 16 this volume for more detailed discussion of anthropogenic forests in West Africa). Secondary landscape transformation occurred in the context of ancient settlements, the alteration of ridge tops, swidden cultivation, and resource management, such as in Pre-Amazonian forests of Eastern Brazil, Central African forests, and various forests of Malesia.