AHRC-NSF MOU - Paleoethnobotany and Landscape in the Southwestern Amazon

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In the upper reaches of the Amazon, earthworks built long before the arrival of Europeans are spread over hundreds of square kilometres of seasonally-flooded savannahs in a region known as the 'Llanos de Mojos'. The Pre-Columbian societies that created and used these earthworks for habitation and agriculture left a permanent imprint on the landscape. Their domestication of these landscapes included forest islands and raised fields, and emerged in the context of crop cultivation over several thousand years. This research uses palaeoethnobotany and landscape archaeology to define the history of combined plant and landscape domestication in the Llanos de Mojos. We propose that cultivation and adoption of specific crops, such as manioc and maize, drove the domestication of these landscapes through altered fire regimes, the development of raised field agriculture and clearance of gallery forests. Forest islands were inhabited by both farmers and cultivated plants. Later, raised fields were built to improve conditions for a wide range of plants. It is suggested that raised fields added flexibility to these agricultural systems allowing more plants to be grown in more places throughout the year. Through strategic landscape sampling, a palaeoecologist from Northumbria University and archaeologists from University of Central Florida will use subsurface cores of lakes and wetlands, stratigraphic excavation of both forest island habitations and raised fields, to obtain complementary datasets that will be used to reconstruct and analyse the long-term agricultural history of the Llanos de Mojos.