Indigenous Populations and Environment in Ancient Amazonia: a paleoenvironmental approach

• Grant number: 20/16412-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: February 01, 2021
• End date: September 30, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Geosciences
• Agreement: AHRC, UKRI
• Principal Investigator: Paulo Eduardo de Oliveira
• Grantee: Luiza Santos Reis
• Host Institution: Instituto de Geociências (IGC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/07794-9 - Human-environment relationships in Pre-Columbian Amazonia, AP.TEM

Abstract

After the 1990s, with increasing scientific evidence of widespread human interference in Amazonian landscapes, a new paradigm was developed for the Amazon. Before seen as a pure and untouched ecosystem, the Amazon is now considered to be home to ancient urban processes, cultural activities, among which stand out a long history of domesticating plants in sync with significant changes in the landscape, especially since the mid-Holocene. With this in mind, the present study aims to test extremely relevant hypotheses about human occupation in the Ancient Amazon, such as the manipulation of food plants and the Garden Model, which provides for the intense manipulation of plant resources to sustain areas urban areas surrounded by a type of agroforestry activities. Our main objective is to reconstruct vegetation, land use and the history of anthropogenic fires in the Late Holocene, as well as gain a comprehensive understanding of how much changes in vegetation were caused by anthropogenic and climatic factors during periods of occupation in the Madeira River basin. (AU)