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Geoarchaeology of a Terra Preta De Índio Site in the Central Amazon By

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Geoarchaeology of a Terra Preta De Índio Site in the Central Amazon By Acts, practices, and the creation of place: Geoarchaeology of a Terra Preta de Índio site in the Central Amazon By Anna Tedeschi Browne Ribeiro A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Rosemary Joyce, Chair Professor Patrick Kirch Professor Ronald Amundson Spring 2011 © 2011 by ANNA TEDESCHI BROWNE RIBEIRO All rights reserved Abstract Acts, practices, and the creation of place: Geoarchaeology of a Terra Preta de Índio site in the Central Amazon by Anna Tedeschi Browne Ribeiro Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Rosemary Joyce, Chair My dissertation investigates inconsistencies in the ways Amazonia has been presented to the public and within archaeology as a discipline. It does so by bringing methods from the earth sciences to bear on sites that resist interpretation under widely accepted models for habitation of pre-Columbian Amazonia. Terra Preta de Índio, a type of Amazonian Dark Earth, is a dark soil produced by deliberate human action that functions as key evidence for intensive environmental and landscape remodeling in pre-Columbian Amazonia. Terra preta sites have been recognized in recent decades as likely resulting from large, permanently settled populations previously believed to be absent from Amazonia. My dissertation reconstructs patterns of daily life and village organization at a terra preta site, Antônio Galo, as a means of constructing an alternative narrative about Amazonia’s past. Prevalent narratives about Amazonia cast the region as homogenous and static, exotic, yet culturally decadent. These deeply embedded images of Amazonia have roots in early narratives of ‘discovery’ and ‘exploration,’ which are tightly interwoven with colonialist projects. Historically, archaeological contributions to knowledge about Amazonia, which make use of notions of social complexity that emerge from colonialist notions about ‘civilization,’ also cast Amazonia as empty and its people as passive in its development. Through an exploration of place, I examine the construction of these narratives, and then employ data that speak to Native Amazonians’ active role in constructing the landscape to propose alternative narratives for Amazonia and its people. In order to detect material traces of past acts of remodeling embedded in the archaeological soil and sediment matrix, I developed a geoarchaeological approach to investigating the household scale at Antônio Galo. I approach the matrix as a particulate body that mediates the relationship between people and their environments and also serves as the stage upon which lives are enacted. Moving away from indices of social complexity, which do not adequately address the scale of daily life in Amazonia, I examine macroscopically visible and invisible traces of the past to reconstruct places created and inhabited by people in the past. Field observations of landscape and environmental remodeling are supplemented by chemical, sedimentological, and microartifactual signatures that help to identify and characterize ancient habitation surfaces and features. Through this nuanced understanding of the various iterations of activity areas, houses, and villages that existed at Antônio Galo, I consider village organization, spatial parsing of activities, and the movement of bodies, in an attempt to recapitulate the lives of people that created and inhabited these places in the past. 1 This text is dedicated to all the peoples of Brazil, past, present, and future – may all of your stories be told, with dignity and respect, and in accordance with your wishes. i Table of Contents Chapter 1. Narrativizing Amazonia: Past and Present .................................................................... 1 Thinking Amazonia .................................................................................................................... 1 Routes to my investigation .................................................................................................... 1 Notes on vocabulary and usage ............................................................................................. 3 The language of „discovery,‟ (on the avoidance of). ........................................................ 3 The land and the earth: terms for navigating the Brazilian Amazonian ground. .............. 4 A path through dark earths .................................................................................................... 5 Chapter 2. Archaeology in the Amazon Basin.............................................................................. 11 Rough sketch ............................................................................................................................ 11 Setting the Stage: First encounters with Amazonia and its past .............................................. 12 By order of the crown .......................................................................................................... 12 Accidental tourists. ......................................................................................................... 12 Reconnaissance missions and royal commissions. ......................................................... 14 “Tilling the soil” in the name of „civilization‟ ................................................................ 15 The encyclopaedia project ................................................................................................... 16 Scientific research programs .................................................................................................... 18 The state of the art in 1943. ............................................................................................ 18 The Handbook series. ..................................................................................................... 19 The new research paradigms: theorizing Amazonia in deep time. ...................................... 21 Resources and the Law of Environmental Limitation. ................................................... 21 History, complexity, and the Cardiac Model. ................................................................. 24 Two sides of the same coin ................................................................................................. 26 Agriculture and subsistence: the stepping stone. ............................................................ 27 Removing the veil: business as usual. ............................................................................ 29 The landscape and the telescope. .................................................................................... 29 Historicity and Heterogeneity .................................................................................................. 30 Seeking cultural complexity: the objectivity of data and the objectivity of models. .......... 30 Chiefdoms on the Orinoco and at Marajó. ...................................................................... 31 The case of the Xingu: Evidence for a “depopulated” chiefdom. .................................. 31 El Beni: the continuous landscape .................................................................................. 32 Amazonian Dark Earths: from the ground up. ................................................................ 32 Contextual models ............................................................................................................... 33 The Central Amazon Project .................................................................................................... 33 Mapping the Confluence Region: basic building blocks ..................................................... 36 Geoarchaeological research in Amazonia ........................................................................... 37 Sister stories. ................................................................................................................... 38 Chapter 3. Images of Amazonia.................................................................................................... 40 Situated Narrative ..................................................................................................................... 40 Colonized places and the act of narration............................................................................ 40 Narrative, representation, and discourse. ........................................................................ 41 Travel writings as representations. ................................................................................. 43 Placemaking and colonial history ............................................................................................ 44 A note on categories ............................................................................................................ 45 ii Mastery over nature ............................................................................................................. 45 Imagining Amazonia ................................................................................................................ 47 Four Images ......................................................................................................................... 48 Savagery, sin, and survival in the jungle: Mapping the unknown. ................................. 48 Land of plenty: Rubber, spice, and the search for El Dorado. .......................................
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