The Paleoindian foragers are remarkable for their brilliantly painted monumental rock artwhich they created in the earliest time of their occupation. They excelled as natural scientists of the heavens and integrated their knowledge of the sun’s behavior through the year with their mythology about the creation of the world and the deities of the supernatural. Thus, their images of constellations and planets are animated as if they were humans or animals. The innovative Archaic fisherpeople built the first mounds from the shells and bones of their food remains. Their relative sedentarism, fostered by the abundant fish and shellfish of the Amazon and its estuary, gave them the opportunity and perhaps the need to make the earliest pottery in the Americas, which they decorated with incision and sometimes red color. The Formative people, the first to rely on horticulture as well as fishing, joined together to create the first great ceramic horizon: the Saladoid-Barrancoid Horizon. Its styles are the first to elaborate Amazonian animal art with sculptured pottery effigies and rim and handle ornaments, and their cultures are the first to raise earth mounds. The first great moundbuilding culture of the lower Amazon, the Marajoara, builds on the Formative styles by adding elaborate polychrome painting and monumental size to the modeled ornaments in their pottery art. The Polychrome Horizon that they initiated spread all along the Amazon mainstream and into the upper Amazon in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Columbia. The greater size, concentration, and prosperity of their populations may have been a stimulus for the construction of their substantial earth mounds, earth and thatch houses, and large ceramic cook stoves, in addition to their large production of ceramic art and utilitarian vessels. Finally, by the final years of prehistory, people in several regions came together in a new horizon style, the Incised and Punctate Horizon, most elaborately developed in the region of Santarém at the mouth of the Tapajos River. This horizon is found very widely in Greater Amazonia, from Venezuela and Colombia, the Guianas, parts of the Amazon mainstream and parts of the upper Amazon. In some areas it does not penetrate into Polychrome Horizon regions and in others it combines with that horizon. The socio-political achievement of the cultures of this horizon was the development of chiefly culture, evidenced in both its settlement pattern and arts. But some cultures of this horizon in
10
.
ANCIENT CIVILIZATIONS OF THE AMAZON
