Indigenous South Americans Of The Past And Present: An Ecological Perspective

Description

Utilizing ethnographic and archaeological data and an up to date paradigm derived from the most efficient features of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, this extensively illustrated book addresses over fifteen South American adaptive systems representing a broad cross section of band, village, chiefdom, and state societies during the continent over the past 13,000 years.Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present presents data on both prehistoric and contemporary indigenous groups across all the continent within an explicit theoretical framework. Introductory chapters provide a brief overview of the variability that has characterized these groups over the long period of indigenous adaptation to the continent and examine the historical background of the ecological and cultural evolutionary paradigm. The book then presents a detailed overview of the principal environmental contexts within which indigenous adaptive systems have survived and evolved over thousands of years. It discusses the relationship between environmental types and subsistence productivity, on the one hand, and between these two variables and sociopolitical complexity, on the other. Subsequent chapters proceed in sequential order that may be at once evolutionary (from the least to the most complex groups) and geographical (from the least to the most efficient environments)?around the continent in counterclockwise fashion from the hunter-gatherers of Tierra del Fuego in the far south; to the villagers of the Amazonian lowlands; to the chiefdoms of the Amazon v�ea and the far northern Andes; and, in the end, to the chiefdoms and states of the Peruvian Andes. Along the way, detailed presentations and critiques are made of quite a lot of theories based on the South American data that have around the globe implications for our understanding of prehistoric and contemporary adaptive systems.

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