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Agricultural and Social Earthworks in the Guianas

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

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State of Knowledge and Current Debates

For few years, pre-Columbian agriculture in Amazonia begins to be better understood, thanks to more accurate studies, exempt of the classical, and too simple dichotomy between the poor interfluvial lands and the fertile floodplains. William Denevan (2001) published a useful synthesis on indigenous agriculture in South America outlining that farming patterns observed today are likely to be very different from those that existed before the European Conquest and the introduction of iron tools. In fact, many pre-Columbian agricultural techniques do not exist anymore today in the region. For that reason, ethnographical analogy is not very useful to understand them. Other data must be taken into consideration.

Pre-Columbian Amerindians transformed deeply the Amazon, whether the vegetal cover, the topsoil, the nature of the sediments, and even the modeling of soil. These changes, volunteers or not, were observed in the first place by geographers,...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research), UMR 8096 “Archaeology of the Americas”, Paris, France

    Stéphen Rostain

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  1. Stéphen Rostain
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Correspondence to Stéphen Rostain .

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  1. Institute of Archaeology, University College London, London, UK

    Dorian Q. Fuller

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Rostain, S. (2018). Agricultural and Social Earthworks in the Guianas. In: Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3039-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_3039-1

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