Abstract
This paper analyzes remotely sensed data sources to evaluate land-use history within the Peruvian department of Amazonas and demonstrates the utility of comparing present and past land-use patterns using continuous datasets, as a complement to the often dispersed and discrete data produced by archaeological and paleoecological field studies. We characterize the distribution of ancient (ca. AD 1–1550) terracing based on data drawn from high-resolution satellite imagery and compare it to patterns of deforestation between 2001 and 2019, based on time-series Landsat data. We find that the patterns reflected in these two datasets are statistically different, indicating a distinctive shift in land-use, which we link to the history of Inka and Spanish colonialism and Indigenous depopulation in the 15th through 17th centuries AD as well as the growth of road infrastructure and economic change in the recent past. While there is a statistically significant relationship between areas of ancient terracing and modern-day patterns of deforestation, this relationship ultimately explains little (6%) of the total pattern of modern forest loss, indicating that ancient land-use patterns do not seem to be structuring modern-day trajectories of land-use. Together, these results shed light on the long-term history of land-use in Amazonas and their enduring legacies in the present.
Highlights
Amidst the mountainous topography of the Andes, Indigenous people have built agricultural terraces for millennia, for a diverse series of reasons––to mitigate against erosion, to manage irrigation systems, to expand planting surfaces, and to modify microclimatic conditions, among others [1,2,3,4,5,6]
We identified terraces in every west-east transect
Gaps in our survey swaths where no terraces were located were most frequently attributed to either declines in visibility due to forest vegetation or imagery resolution, or to topographic extremes such as the Marañón and Utcubamba river ravines or the highest elevation areas of our study region
Summary
Amidst the mountainous topography of the Andes, Indigenous people have built agricultural terraces for millennia, for a diverse series of reasons––to mitigate against erosion, to manage irrigation systems, to expand planting surfaces, and to modify microclimatic conditions, among others [1,2,3,4,5,6]. While many terrace systems seem to have been constructed and managed by small-scale communities, others appear to have been erected at the behest of expansive polities, such as the Wari and Inka, who employed them as tools of agricultural intensification and as elements of sovereign claims over landscapes and peoples [11,12].
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