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Climate change and cultural resilience in late pre-Columbian Amazonia

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 3, pages 1007–1017 (2019)Cite this article

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Abstract

The long-term response of ancient societies to climate change has been a matter of global debate. Until recently, the lack of integrative studies using archaeological, palaeoecological and palaeoclimatological data prevented an evaluation of the relationship between climate change, distinct subsistence strategies and cultural transformations across the largest rainforest of the world, Amazonia. Here we review the most relevant cultural changes seen in the archaeological record of six different regions within Greater Amazonia during late pre-Columbian times. We compare the chronology of those cultural transitions with high-resolution regional palaeoclimate proxies, showing that, while some societies faced major reorganization during periods of climate change, others were unaffected and even flourished. We propose that societies with intensive, specialized land-use systems were vulnerable to transient climate change. In contrast, land-use systems that relied primarily on polyculture agroforestry, resulting in the formation of enriched forests and fertile Amazonian dark earth in the long term, were more resilient to climate change.

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Fig. 1: Regions, archaeological sites94,128,129 and palaeoclimate records discussed in the text.
Fig. 2: Palaeoclimate records discussed in the text (see location in Fig. 1).
Fig. 3: Periods of cultural change and palaeoclimate records for six regions of Greater Amazonia, and regional charcoal curves from the best-sampled regions (Supplementary Methods).
Fig. 4: Two models of land use in late pre-Columbian Amazonia.

http://phylopic.org/image/2dc5f2ee-1fda-4115-9fc6-b8aba1071348/ (right panel palms).

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Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of the 2016 international workshop “Land use and climate changes at the eve of conquest: an interdisciplinary approach”, part of the PAST project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. ERC_Cog 616179). F.W.C. was supported by a São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) grant: 2017/50085-3. V.F.N. was supported by a São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) grant: 2016/15807-5. We thank the members of the PAGES sponsored Global Paleofire Working Group for their support for the global charcoal database.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain

    Jonas Gregorio de Souza

  2. Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Jonas Gregorio de Souza, Mark Robinson, S. Yoshi Maezumi, Dunia Urrego, Daiana Travassos Alves & José Iriarte

  3. Department of Geography and Geology, The University of the West Indies at Mona, Kingston, Jamaica

    S. Yoshi Maezumi

  4. Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

    José Capriles

  5. Department of Anthropology, Baylor University, Waco, TX, USA

    Julie A. Hoggarth

  6. Institute of Geography, Universität Bern, Bern, Switzerland

    Umberto Lombardo

  7. Institute of Geoscience, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Valdir Felipe Novello & Francisco William da Cruz Jr

  8. Instituto Geofísico del Peru, Lima, Peru

    James Apaéstegui

  9. Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK

    Bronwen Whitney

  10. Department of Archaeology, French National Centre for Scientific Research, Paris, France

    Stephen Rostain

  11. Geography Department, The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Mitchell J. Power

  12. Department of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Francis E. Mayle

  13. Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

    Henry Hooghiemstra

Authors
  1. Jonas Gregorio de Souza
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  2. Mark Robinson
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  3. S. Yoshi Maezumi
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  4. José Capriles
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  5. Julie A. Hoggarth
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  6. Umberto Lombardo
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  7. Valdir Felipe Novello
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  8. James Apaéstegui
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  9. Bronwen Whitney
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  10. Dunia Urrego
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  11. Daiana Travassos Alves
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  12. Stephen Rostain
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  13. Mitchell J. Power
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  14. Francis E. Mayle
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  15. Francisco William da Cruz Jr
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  16. Henry Hooghiemstra
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  17. José Iriarte
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Contributions

J.I., J.G.d.S. and M.R. designed the research. J.G.d.S., M.R., J.C., J.A.H., U.L., D.T.A., S.R. and J.I. compiled and interpreted archaeological data. V.F.N., J.A. and F.W.d.C. compiled and interpreted palaeoclimatic data. S.Y.M. and M.J.P. compiled and interpreted palaeofire data. B.W., D.U., F.E.M. and H.H. compiled and interpreted palaeoecological data. J.G.d.S. led the writing of the paper, with inputs from all other authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jonas Gregorio de Souza.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Discussion 1 and 2, Supplementary Tables 1–7, Supplementary Figure 1, Supplementary Methods and Supplementary References

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de Souza, J.G., Robinson, M., Maezumi, S.Y. et al. Climate change and cultural resilience in late pre-Columbian Amazonia. Nat Ecol Evol 3, 1007–1017 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0924-0

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