Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: The Production of Agriculturally Valuable Soils

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Throughout the lower Amazon basin of Brazil, the study of enhanced, human-modified soils, or Amazonian Dark Earth soils (ADE), has shed light on the complex ways in which Native Amazonians interacted with diverse environments. While the study of ADE has demonstrated its importance in the development of complex societies before the arrival of Europeans, there have yet to be any significant studies concerning the transformations of ADE during European colonization of the Amazon. Researchers will collect and analyze samples of ADE soils at the Carrazedo site, located at the confluence of the Xingu and Amazon Rivers, to examine the processes and causes behind transformations of ADE between precolonial, colonial, and modern occupations of the site. This study will provide ecological and anthropological knowledge concerning both the transformations of ADE soils and the political economies associated with their production. The rupture caused by colonialism in this region presents an ideal opportunity to identify the ways in which ADE production, which was originally geared towards subsistence agriculture, transformed to meet the needs of emerging capitalism. Within the Carrazedo community, this project will help to foster greater appreciation of the community's archaeological past, will provide incentive to protect the archaeological site from future development, will contribute to the development of a community-based tourism project at the site, and will provide archaeological training to both community members and undergraduate students. The project also holds great potential towards the ongoing development of productive, yet sustainable strategies for rural agriculture in the Amazon. As the project fine tunes the analyses of the complexities of ADE variability, farming communities may harness this knowledge and benefit from the greater production that high fertility levels of ADE have to offer. Opportunities for less deforestation and greater carbon sequestration also make the study of ADE an important avenue for greater sustainability in the Amazon. Researchers of this project will address questions concerning the chemical, physical, and cultural variability of ADE between precolonial, colonial and modern occupations of the site. Specifically, this study will seek to understand both the intentionality behind ADE production, and the transformation of this traditional ecological knowledge over time. Were these soils being reproduced after the arrival of Europeans? Or were the techniques and knowledge of ADE production lost as a result of colonialism? This study will answer these questions by conducting excavations and collecting soil samples within various activity areas that cover a broad spatial and temporal scope of the site with the intention of understanding the incremental and systematic changes to ADE. Once collected, these samples will be analyzed in order to understand their chemical, physical, and cultural components. These results will then be integrated with findings from archival research in order to gain insight to the nature of historic strategies for agricultural production and community patterning in the greater Xingu-Amazon region.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.