Abstract
The early and mid 20th century was a time of great interest in the rise of agriculture and its role in the evolution of civilizations societies in particular environments. Late 20th century efforts to reconstruct the nature and history of prehistoric farming societies in the northern lowlands of South America ranged from expansive hypotheses to regional case studies using archaeobotanical technologies then available. Since 2000, a large number of regional studies using expanded and refined methods have produced broadly interesting results. Approaches from the fields of geography and earth sciences are being recruited increasingly. The resulting empirical evidence does shed light on aspects of the history of human use of some plants but, as always, has raised more questions than it solved. Many of the problems interpreting the processual and evolutionary significance of these findings are methodological ones. This article reviews what seem to be the most important methodological and interpretive issues of this area of research for the tropical lowlands (up to c. 1500 m a.s.l) of northern South America.
Highlights
1.1 Paradigms for Research on Early FarmingArchaeologists' engagement with early prehistoric agriculture has involved theories of human evolution and models of systematic change through time in the relationship of subsistence and society
Late 20th century efforts to reconstruct the nature and history of prehistoric farming societies in the northern lowlands of South America ranged from expansive hypotheses to regional case studies using archaeobotanical technologies available
The plant in question was maize, and the agricultural systems in which it became the main staple were the floodplain and wetland raised field cultivation systems of the coastal and riverine lowlands of South America. Based on both archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence, the adoption of maize as a staple was the joint achievement of a series of culturally-related, wealthy, populous, and warlike polities that formed along the floodplains of the larger rivers of Caribbean and Orinocan Colombia, the Venezuelan Orinoco, and the Guianas' coasts during late prehistory
Summary
Archaeologists' engagement with early prehistoric agriculture has involved theories of human evolution and models of systematic change through time in the relationship of subsistence and society. Tropical forests and savannas were assumed to have received their cultigens from those outside habitats because their own soils were considered too poor to allow incipient horticulture and the intensive agriculture that state formation required.Scholars' search for origins focused on the few plants that had become important staples in late prehistoric complex societies and esr.ccsenet.org. Cultural ecology turns out to be a more useful and holistic paradigm than environmental determinism for research on the origins and consequences of agriculture This paradigm represents humans' relationships to habitat as always mediated by culture, and considers habitats to be fully integrated into culture and social organization, as the human frameworks through which habitat is viewed and imaged (e.g., Rival & McKey, 2008). This paper will attempt to evaluate the rather disparate data from the area from that point of view
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