ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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

the Orinoco, Guianas, and Bolivian Amazon, also achieved a remarkable agricultural innovation: the development of massive raised fields in floodplain lands for cultivation of crops, primarily maize. Commonalities of the cultures are numerous. A culture of religious animism seems widespread and ancient. All the cultures seem to consider animals and humans as closely related and inanimate entities such as artifacts, water, earth, and heavenly bodies to be animated as either or both humans and animals. Deep and detailed knowledge of nature and human society are integrated into their creation myths and spirituality. Thus, their scientific knowledge of their world was expressed as part of a rich imaginary of creatures and landscapes. By combining the two elements of existence, Amazonians were able to both use and live with their habitats.

What we now know about indigenous adaptations over a long period of 13,000 years is that native uses almost always maintained the forest though they definitely changed the composition of its communities, encouraging certain trees, shrubs, and herbs and domesticating some of them. All the cultures relied on harvesting and management of trees and shrubs, and as early as four thousand years ago, all cultures possessed cultivars and domesticated plants. Almost all the known cultures relied on fishing for their faunal protein, but most used plants for their staple foods. Manioc, maize, and starchy and or oily fruits such as palm fruits were often staples. They also captured and tamed certain animals and even domesticated a few. A few animals, like the muscovy duck, were domesticated, and many were tamed, like the peccaries and many birds, primarily as household companions and for ceremonial foods and materials. Ceremonials tended to focus on larger and rarer animals and on special plants, like acai. What are the possible implications of the Amazonian indigenous cultural sequence? One is that indigenous people created one after another of amazing, rich, long-lived cultures and for that and many other reasons greatly deserve respect and the right to stay on what land is still in their domain. Their example shows us that there are many productive ways to live with the Amazonian forest and its animal inhabitants without damaging or obliterating them. The choices made may depend on the magnitude and distribution of human populations, the technologies and resources available to them, and possible markets. When outsiders come in, who are not learned or dedicated in how to use the land both for subsistence and for the market without irretriavable damage, huge areas of the forest have been destroyed and the waters ruined, by industries that are not sustainable.

The authors wish to acknowledge the many people and institutions that contributed to their archaeological projects and publications. The many wonderful colleagues and students on their field teams are listed in the references to their publications in the bibliography of this book. For Roosevelt, John E. Douglas, Linda Brown, Maura Imázio da Silveira, Christiane Lopes Machado, Ellen Quinn, Christopher Davis, A. Marcio Amaral, Megan Val Baker, and Bruce Bevan deserve to be singled out for their important and long-term contributions to the research design and implementation. In addition, the research could not have been accomplished without the valuable collaboration of two local savants: Helcio Amaral of Santarém and Nelsi Sadeck of Monte Alegre, and two local families: those of Ronaldo and Lucia Cardozo of Belém and Marajo and of Wilton and Jaci Hagman of Santarém and Taperinha. She also received support and encouragement from Marvin Harris, Irving Rouse, Wesley Hurt, Neil Whitehead, Philippe Descola, Susan R. Weld, Alexandra R. Dworkin, Pedro Paulo Funari, Robert Carneiro, Richard Chacon, George Gardner, Craig Morris, Ann Hitchcock Palmer, Egle Barone, Stephen Rostain, Stuart Schwartz, Nigel Smith, Christine Serrao, Mario Simoes, Maria Cristina Tenorio, and Manuela Carneiro da Cunha. To Navarro, João Costa Gouveia Neto, Patrícia Boreggio do Valle Pontin, Alexandra Roosevelt Dworkin, Susan Roosevelt Weld, João Gouveia, Kátia Santos Bogéa, Pedro Paulo Funari, Helena Lima Pinto, Neuvânia Curty Ghetti, Lílian Panachuk, André Prous, Miguel Trefault Rodrigues, Taran Grant, José de Sousa e Silva Júnior, Abrahão Sanderson N. F. da Silva, Luiz C. M. da Rocha, Marcondes Lima da Costa, Antonio Jorge Parga da Silva, Thaís Gonçalves, Ecilene Meneses, Girlene P. Martins, José Raimundo Franco, Francisco Oliveira, Marcelino S. Farias Filho, Clark Erickson, James Krakker, William Wierzbowski, Robert Carneiro, Laila Williamson, Sunru Aricanli and Niels Bleicher. I want to record my great honor in writing this book with Anna C. Roosevelt, who has followed a beautiful trajectory in the archeology of the Amazon, paving the way for several researchers, in which