South American Archaeology: Introduction

INTRODUCTION: TERMS, POLITICS, GEOGRAPHY OF SOUTH AMERICA, HISTORICAL AND THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES, SOCIAL CONTEXT OF DOING ARCHAEOLOGY

Lesson objectives: demonstrate knowledge of basic anthropological archaeology, South American geography, important archaeologists who have worked there, their contributions and theoretical positions, and the contexts within which they have worked, the aims of modern archaeology and its public and political nature.

We begin this class with the request for every student to obtain a map of South America, preferably with modern countries, rivers, mountains not shown so you can draw them and learn them. There are many available on the internet, but blank ones are available from many places as well (internet sources for geography classes, bookstore geography class materials, trace one from an atlas, etc.). Do this by hand so that you will be learning it more intensively. Fill in desert areas, lowland tropical forests and other wet, low areas, the highlands, and learn all the types of environments, which are of course enormously important to how cultures developed. They are also, within one continent, more diverse than anywhere else on the planet.

Please have a map to begin with by next class. For now, what are the modern countries of South America? (counterclockwise from Brazil, French Guiana, Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay). Notice the modern capital cities in each country, often on the coast, an area so important to the dominance of colonial powers, whereas we will see aboriginal capitals and other important sites inland. What are the mountains? The Andes are young and still uplifting, very important for both prehistoric and modern cultures. There are also the Brazilian highlands and other highlands we will contrast with lowlands. What are the important rivers? Amazon and all its tributaries, Orinoco, Magdalena, Parana, these are the biggest. But we will hear a great deal about little short rivers that run westward from the slopes of the Andes across the Peruvian desert (see map your book [Moseley 2001:16]). Be sure to find the equator on your map and be aware of climates as well as elevations. A good place to buy maps full of important information is National Geographic Society (online or in old issues of the magazine); for this class a good one is their Indians of South America map.

All students here should have had already an introductory archaeology course or some understanding of anthropological archaeology. If not, I will recommend various introductory texts for you to use to catch up (e.g., Ashmore and Sharer 2000). We will go over a few terms first, just to review. First define anthropology, since archaeology is a part of it. It is the study of humanity from a bio-cultural perspective. How is anthropology different from all other social sciences? All social science was developed in the West; anthropology is the only one traditionally studying non-Western people and cultures, using participant observation, cross-cultural comparison, and a holistic viewpoint, meaning inclusive of many different kinds of research, linking the biological and cultural and looking for the world-wide perspective. All this can relate to the modern world's different political agendas. Applied anthropology offers advocacy for people without power, without history, such as most of the indigenous peoples of South America. Modern archaeology is also done with an awareness of descendant peoples, of modern national and local government policies, of many different perspectives.

We need to know anthropological terms: what is ethnocentrism? Judging of one culture by the standards of another. Every culture does it; it is just a matter of degree, from the extremes of viewing other lifestyles as inferior to one's own to ethnic cleansing and holocaust. We can find many examples in the news every day. What is the antidote to ethnocentrism? Cultural relativity, or judging a culture in its own terms. Our Western culture is so obsessed with technology that we judge everyone by that standard, even when native technology may be more suitable for the local culture and environment. Emic and etic? They are anthropological terms; etic is the study of a culture by an anthropological specialist and emic is the understanding of the culture from the point of view of the native. Which is better? Both of course are important to do/have. Besides, etic is just someone else's emic. To understand ethnocentrism consider a map, reprinted in an introductory anthropology textbook (Haviland 2000:xxxii), that has south at the top, so South America above North America, and all upside down to us. We are the mapmakers, so we put ourselves at the top, with "up" having greater importance, but there is nothing intrinsic in geography or in the landscape that requires north to be at the top. Today it is the focus of much of the earth's "South" or southern hemisphere to point out how it has many resources but far less of the wealth than the "North" does.

What are the subdisciplines of anthropology? Are they all important for archaeology? Of course. Can we separate biology and culture? Nature vs. nurture arguments are among the most crucial in many world issues today (whether in questions of gender, race, ethnicity, or other social stratification, medicine, and so forth). Cultural anthropology includes specializations such as economic, political, social, folklore, kinship studies, anthropology of art, of dance, ethnomusicology, etc. The primary terms to know are ethnography and ethnology. The former is the recording of culture, the description and detail, while the latter is the use of ethnographic data for scientific study and cross-cultural comparison. We will look at some ethnographic and historic data to help interpret the South American archaeological record. Linguistic anthropology is a very large subdivision of cultural, or a subdiscipline on its own, with a huge body of knowledge and subject matter, including sociolinguistics (how the social setting influences language use), historical linguistics (important to see how languages evolve and originate), language and thought (how one influences the other and vice versa), and other specializations. There were doubtless thousands of native languages all over the South American continent before the European invasion. A few are still extant, such as Quechua, in Peru, Aymara, in Bolivia, many languages of Amazonian groups. But of course most are gone or dying out fast. Biological anthropology comprises two major and overlapping areas: human evolution and human biological variation. Only modern Homo sapiens have inhabited South America, but they have evolved vary interesting biological characteristics such as adaptations to high altitude. With the intrusion of Old World peoples there were differential responses to disease, differential rates of gene flow.

What is archaeology ? The 4th major subdiscipline of anthropology, it is the cultural anthropology of past people, based on study of their material remains; it is very different from the rest of anthropology because of its method. You do not need the people, only their stuff. Archaeology is detective work, with its own specialized techniques, piecing together what happened in the past based on not only the material items and residues, but also their relationships and contexts.

What is applied anthropology? The applied focus can be viewed as necessary to all areas of anthropology: using anthropological knowledge and methods to address modern human issues. There are countless areas of applied focus, from medicine and health care to forensic anthropology to world economic development. In this class we will be doing archaeology with a bit of an applied focus, an awareness of the contexts in which archaeology is done. What is public archaeology? It is applied anthropology. It includes managing archaeological sites and other cultural resources, historic preservation planning (from laws to heritage tourism), antiquities laws, archaeology education, archaeology in the popular media, and the politics of archaeological practice. It involves the anthropological viewpoint because it takes into consideration landowners, descendants, people with political, legal, and other interests in the archaeological record, as well as professional archaeologists. Today, all archaeology is public archaeology. We need to account for how we use public funds to investigate the past, we need to define whose past we are investigating, and why it is important to save it when there are other more pressing world problems. All archaeology can/should be applied anthropology, for example, forensic archaeology, excavation of murder and genocide victims (e.g., Lloyd 2002) in Latin America, the Balkans, elsewhere after ethnic conflict; excavation of World Trade Center victims, finding their artifact possessions. There can be practical, useful information derived from all archaeological work. Rathje's (2002) garbology studies are the most clearly practical in their applications of knowledge about what we throw away (up to 15% usable food in Americans' garbage), what ends up in landfills, what does not degrade as expected (paper being the greatest component of landfills). Many archaeological studies of human effects upon natural environments, and vice versa, are useful today to see the consequences of various natural and cultural disasters, environmental depletion, overuse/extinction of biotic and other natural resources.

Is archaeology biased? All science or other scholarly endeavor is a product of its time, with the political and other biases that might be expected. In this class we will be doing the culture history of South American areas , as well as the latest findings from scientific archaeology, which is often called processual archaeology because we want to look at culture process: how did the first people adapt to the different environments, how did civilizations evolve. We will also have some of what has been called postprocessual archaeology, or the postmodern viewpoint that looks at the biases present based on who is doing the research. What do you suppose might be some modern biases in archaeology? It is still dominated by elites, white upper- or middle-class males in a western capitalist system, in the case of South America, by "gringos" or "yankees" or people from the outside, from the U.S., Japan, other places. Does this matter? Will our interpretation of the past be from a colonial or imperialist perspective only? Will it be different now that more archaeologists are being trained in South America to research their own past? More women? More with indigenous roots, as opposed to European? What about the archaeology of the African heritage in South America? Pizarro brought Africans for slaves from the very beginning of the conquest. Politics are always present in doing any kind of science. We must remember that the orientation of this class will be that of English-speakers, different from that within South America. Pictures we will see from National Geographic and other publications are often biased in favor of Western culture, English-speaking culture, sometimes colonial and imperialist mentalities and esthetics (e.g., Gero and Root 1990)

Here we must mention a small but important point on the spelling of archaeological names for sites, places, and other things in South America. Most of them, like names anywhere in English for things in other languages, are biased in spelling and pronunciation simply because they are not originally English words. Similarly, many of the indigenous names were originally rendered into Spanish or other foreign languages the first time they were written down, which was after the arrival of Europeans to the South American continent. In recent years there has been a movement away from those Spanish spellings since they are in the language of the dominant colonial power which brutalized the natives and left a legacy of oppression that still has negative effects. Thus terms such as Huari, Inca, Tiahuanaco, are now rendered as Wari, Inka, Tiwanaku, using the letters "w" and "k" for example, which are not found in Spanish.

Students in this class should be aware of both sets of spellings since you may be reading older references as well as newer writings. You should also be aware of the political reasons for changing spelling conventions. Recently Korean scholars and politicians have begun a campaign to change the rendering of their country's name in English to "Corea" because the name beginning with K is apparently due to influence of the Japanese during their 1910-45 occupation of the peninsula. The imperial Japanese wanted their colonial people's country not to precede them in the English alphabetical hierarchy. In other languages such as French and Spanish the country's name is spelled with a "C." The debate is moot in the Korean language, which has an entirely different alphabet; furthermore, both South and North Korea have other names for themselves apart from those in English (Los Angeles Times 2003a). Similarly, in South America, not only were indigenous names first written down by foreigners, but also there never was any written native language. So any spellings can be challenged in one way or another. Good anthropologists must realize that "etic" is just somebody else's "emic" and there is no such thing as completely unbiased archaeology (or any other science).

Concerning other items of political interest, we need to review the different theoretical perspectives possible in archaeological interpretation. Bruhns's textbook (1994:6) states that she is doing culture history, describing the different time periods in chronological order and what happened, and she is also giving a good summary of scientific archaeology, understanding the processes of culture change. Moseley's (2001) text does the same and both begin with the earliest history, the time of the Spanish invasion and conquest. Such history will be biased as it is seen from the perspective of Western culture, but it provides a different source of information from the archaeological data.

Like most American archaeologists they (and I, in this class) will be presenting interpretations of the human past in terms of cultural materialism, the viewpoint or theoretical perspective that sees the techno-environmental constraints upon a culture as shaping its foundations, from which social organization and then ideological systems are then developed. Other theoretical perspectives are out there, however. Postprocessual archaeology emphasizes things in the opposite order, in other words, that ideological systems shape society and technology. Many varieties of postprocessual archaeology are popular lately, often due to very different political viewpoints from that of mainstream U.S. archaeology. For example, all over Latin America (Mexico, Central America, South America) a marxist (lowercase because there are so many different versions based on the original philosophy of Marx) framework for interpreting the past is very popular, often called social archaeology. This is a reflection not only of political views of many in these countries, but also of a resistance against colonial dominance and the desire to see that resistance against elites in the ancient past as well. It makes for some tricky situations: I heard that eminent Peruvian archaeologist Luis Lumbreras was denied a visa to come to the U.S. and attend a conference on Rescue Archaeology (salvage of endangered sites and data) in Dallas in the 1980s because he is a Marxist.

Another theoretical framework we will explore is called environmental determinism . Define this? It is the view that the environment determines the cultural development, most famously advocated by Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian, and many others, who saw, for example, cultures in the tropical forest lowlands as recipients of complex ideas from elsewhere, not places where original developments such as agriculture or complex society first emerged. We will be emphasizing how such deterministic frameworks for interpreting the past result in less interest in and understanding of ancient jungle cultures; and this is only recently starting to change. Remember that most of those interpreting the past were NOT indigenous to the lowland tropics themselves, but from temperate climates in the north. Often they saw the tropical rainforest environment as stifling, barren, inhospitable, instead of the incredibly rich ecosystems that are actually present. They thought nothing original and complex could come from environments that supposedly limited possibilities. We will read some works of Anna Roosevelt and others who have found, instead, that there were early and complex developments in the tropical forest lowlands, and that ancient peoples have been manipulating their environments for many millennia earlier than we thought. A more prudent perspective might be called environmental possibilism , attributing cultural evolution to the wide range of variation that is possible within an environment, but not narrowly deterministic and not biased in favor of Western temperate-latitude environments.

By the same token, in exploring South American archaeology we face the bias in favor of interpreting everything through the lens of Peru. The most work has been done in Peru, the best preservation of remains exists in the desert, and next-best in the highlands, many think the earliest complex civilizations emerged in Peru, and the cultural chronology was the earliest developed and extended throughout the continent. There are many books besides the Moseley (1992, 2001) text we are using that emphasize Peruvian prehistory, and I have used many in preparing this course (e.g., Keatinge 1987, Lumbreras 1974, Von Hagen and Morris 1998, Wilson 1999). Other texts take a general Andean perspective (e.g., Isbell and Silverman 2002, Matos, Turpin and Eling 1986, Richardson 1994, Stanish 1992), and far fewer, the perspective of the tropical forest (e.g., Lathrap 1970, Roosevelt 1980, 1999). The late Gordon Willey (1971) was the only major author to document the entire continent in an English-language book before the Bruhns (1994) text, and Salomon and Schwartz (1999) is a newer work, in two volumes, dealing with the whole continent but in individual chapters and with some social awareness, especially for post-invasion transformations. Another new work is Lavallée (2000). I use all these books for class lectures (and others indicated in later modules as well, as they also have good maps, photos, and other illustrations).

Cultural evolution on the continent of South America produced unique civilizations (and we will look at the anthropological definition of civilization later), thousands of individual cultures and languages, and many different modes of existence through time and space, including vast empires. We will go through the course in chronological fashion, and see early hunter-gatherers evolving in some areas into food producers but in other areas still hunting, gathering, and fishing in historic times. We will examine many ideas about the origins of agriculture and social complexity, and the later origins of the various civilizations that emerged long before the Inca. The continent is a wonderful laboratory for anthropological comparison with cultural evolution in the rest of the world. We no longer subscribe to those normative, unilineal ideas about progression through stages of complexity, and we will see civilization without any written language or wheeled vehicles . And why would you need wheeled vehicles in the jungle or the mountains? See Bruhns's (1994:4) statement that the problem of building roads for wheeled vehicles hasn't been really solved in much of South America. This is one reason airplanes are used a lot, and trains. The train I took on a visit to Cuzco went up into the highlands, climbing mountains. You cannot climb straight up, but must zig-zag back and forth across the side of a mountain to get up, moving from switchback to switchback with the forward end of the train alternating with the rear end to go first (the Spanish name for switchback is zigzag!). Bruhns points out that writing developed in Eurasia from physical objects, geometric tokens. Similarly, in South America, the quipu , knotted cords, were physical means of record keeping. Quipucamayoc were scribes who were trained to remember and interpret the quipu, but their knowledge was lost and we cannot quite read it, though we are still trying - we can read the numbers, but do not know numbers of what, nor what the different kinds of knots and colors of cords meant (Ascher and Ascher 1981, Quilter and Urton 2002, Urton 2003).

What was Tawantinsuyu? The Inca land of the 4 quarters, mapped out in your books. Some other basics to remember: the Inca were not the earliest civilization in South America , indeed, they were the latest indigenous civilization. They emerged little more than a century before Old World invaders arrived and expanded into the largest indigenous nation in the New World (or on earth, even, for the time) by armed conquest . We will ask whether earlier states needed conflict to gain power. Did the Inca downfall come from armed conquest? Not really. Yes, the Spaniards had arms, but they had a much more powerful and inadvertent weapon, biological warfare and the spreading of disease that native peoples had little resistance to. Moseley (2001:7) notes how the great wealth of Tawantinsuyu fostered its downfall, and Pizarro in 1532 tricked the Inca emperor at Cajamarca. We will read later about the conquest, but it is a good idea to look at the treatment of it in history books as opposed to anthropological studies, the difference between just chronology of events and understanding of the processes of cultural interaction, in this case intrusion and forced enculturation of the Indians by the Spanish. When conquistadores turned up on New World shores at first it was interaction between totally alien civilizations. It would be similar to what would happen if some spaceships landed downtown and some green beings got out and tried to talk to us and get our stuff. What would we do? There would be jockeying for power and influence by different groups who wanted to deal with the aliens, once they became a little bit understood. But we would not really understand why they were here or what they wanted, especially if they both gave us little gifts and killed some of us! You can imagine how it would be if they wanted something we have a lot of, say, water or iron or something plentiful on our planet that they coveted (and lots of science fiction scenarios are like this).

What is the difference between anthropology and history? The chronology of the conquest and descriptions were written by the winners, the Spanish and other colonial powers, so we need to understand the biases inherent in these writings. On top of that, the Spanish got much of their knowledge of other peoples from the Inca who had conquered or otherwise dealt with them, so they also transmitted the Inca's biases. Archaeology is the tool for learning about both Inca and all the other past peoples without those biases of written history.

What are the biases of archaeology? There are many, of course, but they are different from those of history and other social science (you learned them in introductory archaeology class, or can review them on your own). Just for some examples, what about dating methods? Radiocarbon dating indicates when the organic thing died, so if it is wood used for centuries, the date will be off. Also, a radiocarbon date needs to be calibrated based on a dendrochronology curve, it is a statistical approximation, and it is expensive, especially for poorer countries' archaeologists. U.S. archaeologists constantly complain they don't have enough money for proper research (and we never do!) but we are so wealthy compared to someone doing archaeology in any South American country and working for a state or national agency - they are all poorly funded (compared with, say, the military or some other national priority). Another archaeological bias we must watch for is that conception of cultural evolution in linear "stages," as already noted, such time periods can have names that are heavily value-laden (such as "Formative" or "Classic" in Mesoamerica). Bruhns (1994:9-12; and see Moseley 2001:22) presents various schemes of evolutionary stages used in South America on a nice comparative table and shows how they are inappropriate; the series used on the central coast of Peru, in the Ica Valley is the best for the moment, even though it is a bit biased in favor of technology (e.g., "Preceramic"). We will use these terms as operational units, recognizing that throughout the continent very different things might be going on at the same time.

What about biases in other archaeological terms ? Spellings for South American site names, time periods, and other concepts were traditionally spelled according to the hispanicization of native names (e.g., Huari, Inca); newer versions (e.g., Wari, Inka) avoid Western biases. Much of the literature still uses the traditional spellings, so at least be aware of them and of the newer variants and reasons for their use. Similarly, we can express dates in years B.P., before the present (usually based on radiocarbon dating, but we must know whether or not this has been calibrated according to the correction curve from dendrochronology; see your introductory archaeology books), or in dates B.C. or A.D., according to the current calendar in the Western world. But this is ethnocentric also, since the terms refer to before Christ or after (actually A.D. = anno domini, year of the lord, meaning since Christ's birth [whenever that actually might have been!]). So many prefer to use B.C.E., before the Christian era, or better, before the common era, and A.C.E. or C.E., meaning after or within the common or Christian era. It gets even more confusing in Spanish, because you might see a tag on an exhibit in a South American museum that says years A.C. or D.C., antes de Cristo or despues, before or after. Be aware of all these variations.

What are the major characteristics of the geography of South America? First, there are the incredible extremes, from snow-capped mountain to the driest desert in the world to the steaming tropical rainforest lowlands. Discussing Andean cultures, Moseley (2001:8) notes that this is the only cradle of civilization where the tourist gets heart seizures and altitude sickness. He (Ibid: 25) says that for civilization to emerge in South America is the equivalent of a thriving state covering the Himalayas, the Sahara desert, the Bering Sea, and the Congo jungle. Most of South America is in the tropics, so the climate is determined by altitude and rainfall. Bruhns (1994) is the better text for climate all over the continent, and she has great landscape photos of the very diverse environments. Also note here great appendix listing plant and animal species, resources available in the different environments, and learn the important ones.

We must understand the long chains of the Andes mountains which run along the whole western edge, and the orogeny or mountain building that is still underway, since these are young mountains (compare the low, eroded, old Appalachians in the eastern side of the U.S.). Read the part on plate tectonics well; the Continental Plate is moving west, and the Nasca Plate, eastward, some 9-15 cm per year, smashing together. So we have the world's longest cordillera (chain; look at Bruhns's good glossary) made up of smaller chains. Please consult your maps and see 3 ranges in Colombia, 2 in Ecuador. The south part of the H is the altiplano, the high plains, cold and dry in Peru, Bolivia, Chile, western Argentina. See the basins, with internal drainage, the high altitude Lake Titicaca with its rich resources. In south Chile the salt puna = salt pans. All of this is a major center of human population and biological species domestication! 90% of the water runoff from the Andes goes eastward, so we must keep this in mind when we look at the west coast. On the southern plains, savanna, and puna there are many herd animals, the camelids descended from Pleistocene camels that covered the New World. After the end of the Ice Age there were none left in North America but several in South America, the llama, alpaca, vicu Z a, guanaco.

What is El Niño? We Americans are more familiar with it since the 1998 El Niño that brought so much rain to Florida (my Christmas guests were getting stuck in the mud of my driveway). Bruhns's (1994:32) discussion on El Niño shows how this removal of the cold Humboldt current and substitution of a warm current and lots of rain affects climates all over the globe. The cold currents are nutrient-rich and inhibit rain. In the north Andes there are wet, heavy forest covers, highland basins between ranges, and there were active volcanoes in recent geological history. There is seismic instability everywhere, and both earthquakes (sudden occurrences) and slow, continual tectonic movement of the earth that, as we will see, messed up many human constructions. The many rivers were hugely important for transportation and communication routes, as well as for water and species that need water or live in it. Most of the rivers go eastward, an important aspect to remember. The high valleys of northern Bolivia and Ecuador have rich forests in which to hunt and good soils for crops. Highland crops developed were quinoa (a high-altitude grain you can now buy here in health food stores), and many root crops such as potatoes (no, they did not come from Ireland), and ulluco. Freeze-drying potatoes was not invented recently but many millennia ago in the South American highlands. Also in the north we get humid high grasslands called páramo, like puna only wet and cold, with lots of fog. At the south end of the continent we get humid temperate to cold climates, lots of rainfall, canoe nomads such as the Alacaluf Indians.

It is important to note there are other uplands besides the Andes, such as the Brazilian highlands, in the southeast, with mimosa forests and pampas, upland prairies. Other highlands occur between the Amazon and Orinoco Rivers in the northeast, just behind mangrove coastlines. The north coast, Venezuela, has little rain and thorny scrub.

What are the characteristics of the western coastal plain? In the north, Colombia and Ecuador, there is rainforest and mangrove coast. Behind this is savanna and forests, with lots of drowned coast and estuary around the Gulf of Guayaquil (please find this on your maps) - very similar to the Florida Gulf coastline. In the south we have semi-arid to complete desert. In the Atacama desert (find on map) there is simply no rain. The recent National Geographic story (Vesilind 2003; show photos) calls it the driest place on earth, and notes how natural mummification of buried bodies many thousands of years ago apparently led prehistoric people to make prepared mummies of their dead.

On the Pacific coast there is fog (garua) and xerophytic vegetation (lomas) or cloud forest. The valleys are habitable because they have water in the rivers, but they are all little short river valleys coming down the mountains toward the west. In the far south the rivers do not even reach the coast. Inland in central Chile are mild temperatures (good for grapes and winemaking - have you tried the Chilean wines now packing the supermarket shelves?). The cold rich waters of the Pacific are very rich in fish, mammals, molluscs, marine birds (and lots of guano), and we will see later Moseley's maritime hypothesis, that the richness of resources on the coast allows for early sedentism and pre-adaptation for complex culture and later agriculture. A particularly important resource is the anchoveta, a little fish we know of only in the form of those slinky anchovies on our pizza, but rich in nutrients and easy to smash into a paste you can have with any other foods (a lot of Thai and other SE Asian cooking uses such fish paste - smells pretty awful in the can but makes food tasty). The Atlantic coast is not well described in either of your books, but of course that ocean also has a rich diversity of fish, marine mammals, shellfish that allowed for construction of huge shell mounds (in Brazil, called sambaquis), and estuarine resources.

We must remember the biases of preservation in the desert. On the rainless coast, everything dries out and remains. Gordon Willey (1989:107) said that, coming from U.S., he was astounded at the preservation. Digging an Inca site, Pachacamac, near Lima, he trenched a midden full of densely packed maize stalks, other vegetal fibers, peanut shells, and textiles. He remembers a workman who injured his foot pulled a textile fragment out of the excavation profile to use as a bandage!

What are the characteristics of the jungle? Tropical lowlands extend throughout the Amazon basin and the Orinoco, to which the Amazon is connected by the Casiquiare Canal (check this on maps). There are rios negros and blancos - black and white, depending upon whether they are clear (blackwater, just like in Florida) or full of sediment and nutrients (white water - look at aerial photos). South of all this are the wetlands of the Llanos de Mojos and the Gran Chaco (find on maps) which flood annually and merge the waters of the Paraguay and Madeira Rivers and make one big lake extending to the estuary of the Plata. The Pantanal is the world's largest wetland, about 2/3 the size of Florida, covering SW Brazil and bits of Bolivia and Paraguay, in the center of the continent. We must understand the importance of wetlands all over the New World, where the only way to go someplace was to walk or take the boat, and where aquatic resources are easier to get than running after a terrestrial animal. We also must understand the seasonality of water, and how the rainforest and open wetlands have dry seasons as well. Humans have exploited these environments to a great degree, making canals to trap fish and connect waterways, harvesting palms in the swamp forest of the southern wetlands. Archaeology is recovering more and more evidence lately of human manipulation of environments, especially in the tropical rainforest.

This is especially true of the Amazon . One of the largest rivers in terms of flow, the Amazon begins with streams thousands of kilometers away on the west side of the continent, where its upper reaches have narrow, high jungle valleys. By the time it reaches its mouth on the east side of the continent, there is a huge estuary with drowned tributaries and distributaries, swamps, wet prairies, and a large island, Marajó, right in the middle of the mouth. The Amazon sends out so much fresh water that streams of it are still present hundreds of kilometers out into the Atlantic. The ecosystems around it are huge and diverse, and perceived as unfavorable or as Bruhns (p.37) calls it, "green hell" by those used to temperate climates.

And here we have one major bias in South American archaeology, the tendency to favor the evidence of the coast and highlands and de-emphasize the jungle. There are important reasons for this. First, well, it is a jungle out there, and difficult to get around, difficult to see thing, see broad landscapes (unless you are on the river). There is in general less biological and geological research on tropical forest environments as well, because of the logistical problems. And everyone wants to work in the highlands because they don't want to swelter - this is similar to the neglect of the southeastern U.S. until air-conditioning became a mainstream entity in our lives. But this is a major prejudice, assuming all humans feel this way, assuming complicated things can only happen in cooler climates. Then there is the additional bias of preservation. Everything rots in the jungle, but survives in the desert because it is dry, or (to a lesser extent) in the highlands because it is cold. So the assumption is that there is less left to be able to learn in the tropical lowlands. We will see in this course how that is not necessarily the case. But even Bruhns's text (p. 42) shows that bias in saying that the natural environment delimited the regions in which dense populations could develop, the regions of major cultural development being along the western margin of the continent. This is what we think because there has been more archaeology done along the western margin.

Many researchers have emphasized the poor soils of the tropical rainforest, but the nutrients are caught up in the forest and vegetative canopy, which is huge. There are many animals, often smaller animals, and a much higher species diversity (though not numbers of animals, necessarily), and seasonal variation which would have been exploited by aboriginal populations. The Amazon has the greatest biotic diversity in the Western hemisphere. It is not one homogeneous ecosystem but has very distinct subregions with different environments and different archaeology, so we need to be aware of this. You can hunt during the rainy season, and you can always get great amounts of protein in aquatic resources, birds, monkeys, tapir, rodents, large saltwater fish that are found hundreds of miles up the river. We will note throughout prehistory, history, and modern economic systems, the importance of resources that come from the South American lowlands: First there are food plants such as squash, tomatoes, peanuts, pineapple, avocado, papaya, guava, chirimoya, sapote, mamey, (many of these fruits now available at your local supermarket), nuts such as Brazil nut, cashew, a very important crop that most in the U.S. never use, manioc - which we in Tampa are familiar with in Cuban restaurants and groceries, where it is called yuca (it is also called cassava). Besides these are other plants for industrial use, such as cotton and rubber, and important drugs, so many that we are familiar with only a notorious few, such as coca, quinine, strychnine, curare, and hallucinogens such as datura, San Pedro cactus (produces a type of mescaline) and ayahuasca ( Banistereopsis vine whose woody bark and leaves produce the drug). Check the appendix in the Bruhns book for other economically important plants today which originate in the South American jungle, such as orchids, vanilla, begonias.

Major aboriginal crops that probably moved into South America from northerly points of origin are maize or corn (which may actually have been domesticated independently here, however, and not necessarily come in from Mexico) and tobacco. Important domesticated animal species are few, including all those camelids and possibly turkeys and guinea pigs (tastes like -- rabbit! called cuy in local restaurants around Cuzco). The llama and other herd animals were used not only for meat but for wool and for transport of (small) burdens. Dogs of course were also domesticated. Other animal species important to hunting are familiar ones such as deer and some less known by North Americans, such as the capybara, the largest living rodent, as big as a sheep.

What is transhumance? This term refers to scheduled seasonal migration, movement from higher to lower altitudes over the course of the year, especially with llama herders moving down into warmer valleys and the coast for the cold season and back up higher during the warm season. It is very important to stress that movement between environmental zones was common and perhaps crucial to successful adaptation all over the continent. There was movement to and from the Atlantic and Pacific coast and inland, and so forth. We also must be able to distinguish archaeologically such actual movements of people, seasonally or otherwise, from movements of their goods through trade or other kinds of economic or other exchange.

What kinds of natural catastrophes would have affected aboriginal peoples? The extremes of environment would bring everything from avalanches, mudslides, earthquakes, and volcanoes in the highlands to tsunamis (tidal waves) on the coast. After a 1746 earthquake the tidal wave drowned 4000. Perhaps lowland/wetland flooding and storms would also be disasters but maybe not as great? El Niño is now understood in terms of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation or ENSO phenomena, climatic events and processes that are the subjects of much study these days since we realize world weather is affected by them. People are coring into deep Andean mountain glacier ice to see records of ancient ENSO events.

What are people's adaptations to harsh conditions and catastrophe? They can be physical (genetic or plastic) or cultural or both. We know that Andean natives, living perhaps a couple of miles high, have a greater lung capacity and other biological adaptations to high altitude. But they still descend to lower altitudes, if possible, for childbirth. They still take coca for easing the stress of altitude. If you the tourist go to Cuzco, the first thing you will do after you get off the plane or train and try to walk is drink coca tea. It is not illegal or mind-altering, just a steeping of the leaves in hot water (that tastes awful to me). You are told to drink the tea and go to your hotel room and lie down and go to sleep, so your blood can make more red blood cells to get more of the scarce oxygen. You might get a headache too, but a day later you can walk a little bit more easily. So we have cultural adaptations too, and by the way, we will see how using coca medicinally is a practice with thousands of years of history, not easily to be discarded despite what is desired by richer, more northerly countries whose residents pay big money for refined versions of the plant's chemicals (cocaine). As far as adapting to the ENSO weather events, some new studies we will explore seem to be showing that, even if the warm current kills off the rich anchoveta schools, there are other seafoods that are equally harvestable, so people do not have to starve. We will discuss more of these resources and environments as we go through the course.

What are characteristic trends in the history of South American archaeology? For one, the dominance of outsiders, not only from North America but elsewhere, until recently. Read Bruhns's good discussion. Beginning in the nineteenth century, there were naturalists commenting on archaeological things. Ephraim G. Squier, famous to U.S. archaeologists for surveying mounds and earthworks in the Midwest U.S., was the U.S. commissioner arbitrating with Peru over guano! He spent years of research and published his work in 1877 with great drawings you would expect of a surveyor (see example of his drawing in Willey and Sabloff 1993:7576). There were German excavators from the 1870s onward, and a famous German is Max Uhle (photo in Willey and Sabloff 1993:76), a Berlin archaeologist, who spent his life in the Andes from the 1890s-1930s as he researched archaeology, art styles, architecture, and set up a chronology of time periods in prehistory (without any radiocarbon dating methods). When radiocarbon dating was invented in the 1950s the chronology was adjusted accordingly.

Who was the first famous Peruvian archaeologist? Julio Tello was a professional who worked during the first half of the 20 th century and first defined an even earlier culture, Chavin, proposing by the 1940s that it originated in the jungle. But few indigenous archaeologists followed his fame. After World War II there were various Americans such as Gordon Willey, who did archaeology's first settlement pattern study and survey in the Viru Valley, and Junius Bird, who worked on the famous Huaca Prieta coastal Peruvian midden site with its incredible preserved textiles. In the 1950s and 60s there were many more Americans (Lanning, McNeish) and Japanese; most of them emphasized Peru and saw a nice unilineal progression from hunting-gathering to agriculture and settled life to civilization.

Meanwhile, back in the jungle, there were developments that left lasting effects. In the 40s Julian Steward , famous anthropologist and proponent of cultural ecology (tying in cultural practices with natural environments), produced the Handbook of South American Indians in 7 volumes from 1946-59 . It began with the culture area approach, rejected diffusionism (culture explained as developing with influences from elsewhere) for ecological functionalism (culture explained as adaptation to be useful, successful in its natural environment). But Steward ran into problems in the tropical lowlands, where he saw too few wild and agricultural resources available, so said there would be limited population density and settlement, and therefore restricted cultural evolution, with nothing more complex than unstratified local villages (Roosevelt 1980, Willey 1988). But contact-period accounts by Europeans had documented very complex societies with dense populations in the tropical forests, and even some archaeological evidence existed to support this, as well. Realizing this, Steward abandoned cultural ecology and went back to diffusion. He postulated culture "types" developing in the Andes and radiating out to the rest of South America in sequential evolutionary fashion, so that agriculture and sociopolitical complexity in the jungle were derived from elsewhere. His evolutionary model listed stages that happened first in the Andes and diffused to other locations, so that everyone went through them at different rates. He disagreed with Tello that anything complex could move out of the tropical forest and into the highlands, and even saw that what complex "formative" villages had existed ended up "decaying" into "tropical forest culture" of simpler small villagers because of the lack of concentrated resources that limited population density. Gordon Willey (1988:224-231) documents this whole process very nicely in summarizing Steward's life, noting how later when it became obvious that the picture was much more complicated, Steward put forth a multilinear evolution model showing that there was no single path cultures take through time.

So, is anthropological theory important? Of course, since it affects all our interpretations. These early archaeologists were struggling with simple models of culture types, labeling them "advanced civilizations" or "primitive bands" without realizing the enormous implications of such ethnocentric terms, without seeing that cultural evolution (like biological) is not teleological, has no end point of the biggest and best and most complex, and that cultures change and adapt, or not, for many reasons, and go through many forms and trajectories over time. Indeed, many indigenous groups in the Amazon today are foragers and horticulturalists with simple village organization very different from the large complex settlements we are now seeing in the prehistoric past. This has colored many interpretations beyond Steward's as we shall see. Much of what I present here is not in your readings (some from Roosevelt 1980), but important to understand modern interpretations.

Getting back to the archaeological history, also in the late 40s, Irving Rouse, who was already famous in Florida archaeology, found some of the earliest ceramics in the New World on the Caribbean coasts, early manioc griddles, and large nucleated settlements far more complex than Steward's "tropical forest cultures." In the 50s projectile points in the circum-Caribbean area indicated a Paleo-Indian presence, and finally they were also found in the Amazon, pushing back the record of habitation all over the continent to the very earliest times of the late Ice Age. Meanwhile the earliest ceramics in the central Andes were some 1000 years later than those of lowland Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil.

Studies on plant domestication located possible centers for manioc in the Orinoco, difficult because not only from rare preserved plant remains, but also from the griddles used to process them. And radiocarbon dating changed a lot of interpretations. Now we can see various tropical forest cultures as good ecological adaptations to lowland jungle environments, not a "decay" of complex things from the Andes. (Steward should have stuck to cultural ecology, maybe?). Meanwhile, influenced by Steward, Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian went to the other extreme and held the environment accountable for everything! In the 50s the American Anthropologist published her article entitled Environmental Limitation on the Development of Culture (Meggers 1954), and several subsequent publications (e.g., Meggers and Evans 1963) expanded on her idea that cultures can only develop to a "low level" in tropical environments because there is low agricultural potential, so therefore low population density and low sociopolitical complexity. The best the natives could have done was swidden or shifting agriculture, as in Mesoamerica lowlands, no high-intensity agriculture. Well, now we know that there was intensive agriculture in the Mesoamerican lowlands that we could not see in the jungle that grew over it later, and the same seems to be true for South America. Even though Meggers excavated on Marajó Island in the mouth of the Amazon and found large complex mounds, earthworks, polychrome pottery, and evidence of social stratification, she explained it by diffusion in from the Andes, with later "decay " of such complexity. Later Meggers excavated at Valdivia in Ecuador and found very early pottery in which she saw similarities with some of the earliest pottery on earth, from Jomon, Japan; she decided that Japanese fishermen had crossed the Pacific and crashed on the shores of Ecuador and brought this pottery and other complex cultural ideas (Meggers, Evans, and Estrada 1965). So she was a big diffusionist.

To Meggers's credit, she did many great things, not the least of which was producing a huge amount of great data for archaeologists to chew around. She was also one of the few outsiders of that time to work closely with archaeologists based in South American countries (such as Estrada), who appreciate her a great deal, and she published her data and was the major figure, a woman, whose name came first before those of her husband (Evans) and other men - a rarity in the 1950s and 60s for any professional woman. However, she has spent many decades since her original work trying to reaffirm it, just as so many others have spent all this time trying to refute it (Popson 2003 has wonderful color pictures of her in the 50s in the field, and today). As we will see, most of the succeeding work does not support Meggers's environmental determinism (e.g., Funari 1999, Neves 1999).

In the 60s Donald Lathrap (1970) of Illinois saw early complexity and agricultural origins, not to mention the development of complex art, in the Amazonian rainforest diffusing westward to the highlands to trigger the emergence of civilizations. This was similar to Tello's hypothesis on tropical forest origins for Chavin. At the same time Robert Carneiro (1970) demonstrated that agriculturalists in the jungle would be very productive and not deplete nutrients, so that there was no environmental circumscription limiting culture, but instead he saw social circumscription , the barriers to populations growing and splitting because there was no room in densely populated areas, and this would lead to lots of conflict, slavery, and so on. We have only recently learned that the poor soils we see in the Amazon are the result of permanent destruction of areas of the rainforest where the trees will not regrow, nor can agriculture be done, because the fertility is stripped, especially in higher areas, though not so much in alluvial areas where annual flooding renews fertility. Many arguments coming out of the 70s related to population pressure as causing cultural change; this was to be expected from the intellectual climate of ecological awareness and zero population growth movements. Science is always a product of its time. One flaw in the arguments that population growth caused complexity to develop was that it could not be explained what caused the population growth. There have since been many arguments that the tropical lowlands were always hinterlands because they did not offer enough resources. I have never understood this because they are such rich ecosystems.

We will look at the work of Anna Roosevelt , who has directly challenged the work of Meggers (even calling her a CIA spy) and of all those theorists who think that nothing complex comes out of the jungle. Roosevelt is clear on how there are many different kinds of environments in the tropical lowlands, and how manioc was probably domesticated first in the Orinoco and Amazon basins. The interpretation of jungle archaeology is just one example of the many ongoing controversies in South American archaeology (e.g., Gibbons 1990, Mann 2000). I emphasize it here because it is so fascinating but also to show that not all the emphasis should be upon the Andean civilizations (which have lots of their own controversies and debates). As the profession of archaeology grew tremendously in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, there came to be hundreds of archaeologists, many new specialist journals, and other expansions of South American work, which we will detail throughout this course. But many of the historic proclamations and assumptions in the field have been hard to see beyond.

As in any other profession, archaeology is full of opposing viewpoints and biases, and there are many professionals who stubbornly cling to their ideas even when they are shown to be unsupported by the data, or who may have grudges against opposing factions. Gordon Willey once chuckled to me about how crazy it was that two women (Meggers and Roosevelt) were at war intellectually over the archaeology of the Amazon! We will try to look at all sides of arguments (in abbreviated forms) so as to understand the possibilities. As non-specialists, we may find it harder (or easier) to interpret the data apart from the researcher, so often we must go with the argument that makes the most sense. We must also remember the imperialist nature or almost colonial mentality of outsiders from the north doing the investigations and interpretations, often from elite research institutions and universities far removed from South America, taking away the artifacts and knowledge and only sporadically sharing it with the people who lived in those countries. Now this is changing and outsiders are helping to train indigenous archaeologists and vice versa.

What are the social and intellectual contexts of South American archaeology today? We still concentrate in this course on writings by English-speaking researchers, since we are in a U.S. university. But now it is clear that no outside archaeologist is able to work well in South America without interaction with both local archaeologists and local people in general in the research area. In fact, even local archaeologists have trouble with local residents, mostly because of the looting problem. What local and international factors make looting such a problem in South America? While archaeologists consider it unethical to buy and sell artifacts (much like buying and selling human organs), sometimes it is the only way impoverished indigenous people can make a living. The antiquities markets in Europe, the U.S., and Japan, especially, of course encourage such traffic, and the people really getting rich are of course the dealers. Why does an ancient Peruvian pot command more dollars than, say, an ancient Florida pot?

Compare the treatment of the archaeologist in the two articles by Atwood about the rich Moche (Early Intermediate) site of Sipan. What are the very different targeted audiences? In "Stealing History" the impression is that the professionals ignore locals and their needs; this article is in Mother Jones , a periodical whose aims are international justice and fighting against poverty and exploitation by elites. One of the signs illustrating the problem says "Alva, gracias por tenernos en la mas extrema pobreza," telling the archaeologist, thanks for leaving us in extreme poverty! When the cops come to get the looters, one gets shot, and the archaeologist is blamed. He gets fame and sensational artifacts, and 15 years later the people living near the site are still without paved roads, running water, or medical care. The second article, from Archaeology magazine, seems very different, showing how the archaeologist IS working with local people to educate them and enlist them in the cause to help stop looting and protect their own heritage; he is even paying them some wages, though it is difficult. What are the mixed goals and messages of the project? Of the two articles? What would happen if Walter Alva, who is based at a museum in Trujillo, about an hour away from Sipan, were not a Peruvian but a foreigner? This is cultural resources management done under ridiculous conditions, since the cops had to be there, be armed, and be shooting. But huaqueros, looters , are involved in a trade as risky and able to bring big money as the drug trade. The opposition to Alva was opposition to his urban opportunities to education, jobs, and better social conditions. His dedication to preservation of the national cultural heritage or patrimonio has apparently overcome some of the opposition, but it sure helped that he had paying jobs for some as well. Be sure you read these, as well as all the assignments, with a mind for critical thinking and extracting what is meaningful to the different "stakeholders" in the quest to understand the past.

Some terms are important to understand here. Huaca means mound or ancient burial ground, and as Bruhns's glossary indicates, it comes from the Inca word for sacred place. A huaco is an ancient pot or other artifact. A looter is a huaquero. The cultural heritage of a people is usually translated for Spanish-speaking countries these days as patrimonio, though I prefer what some are using, herencia cultural (it is less sexist; imagine "matrimonio"!). There are various terms for cultural resources management (CRM), but much of this work is still salvage archaeology and referred to as "rescue archaeology" or arqueología de rescate (Wilson and Loyola 1982). Very little of CRM and site protection, not to mention public archaeology in general, is given in your two textbooks. But there has been increasing awareness of the issues. Three "New World Conferences on Rescue Archaeology" have taken place in the 80s, two in South America (Wilson and Loyola 1982), and also a World Archaeological Congress, in Venezuela in the 90s. There are now more and more websites showing what different countries are doing. Most are not in English, so I cannot assign them within this class as a required exercise, but we will look at a few in class and I ask you to try to find some, even if you just look at the pictures. Some websites, such as www.incaconquest.com, are just summaries of prehistory with not much social awareness of the context of modern archaeology.

We need to understand the negative aspects of world heritage management - some outside agency comes in to put a local site on a list for preservation and recognition, wealthy visitors traipse in and out, and the local people, who do not even have basic human services, don't care about heritage but want some of that wealth. This is true all over the world, not only in South America. In much of the postmodern lingo, we can say that the concept of cultural property or heritage is culturally constructed. Pedro Funari (1998) of Brazil has written some wonderful articles on how his country and so many others are interested in abandoning the past and being new and modern, rushing for progress and construction of modern buildings in a new modern capitol city of Brasília. He notes how the standing architecture that gets preserved is usually that which is important in elite white history, the Catholic Cathedral, not the poor black church. He also (Funari 2000) notes that the pride of the indigenous native that can be seen in Mexico or Peru, where there are far more Indians remaining today, is absent in Brazil and other countries on the east side of South America, where there is a larger European presence. Brazilian construction for modernization does not take into account the uses of the land by existing native peoples, even when archaeologists point it out, which they seldom do, since contract archaeology is not well-linked with native communities, much to its detriment. This is supposed to be a major issue in modern archaeology, having an awareness of its effects upon local communities. But it is taking time to sink in. I have a friend working on the archaeological survey in the path of a big natural gas pipeline in Bolivia, who is employed by a huge American international company that is building the pipeline. So they are only doing the archaeology because of regulations forcing them to. Is there motivation to do a thorough job? Will they have time to take into account the local people impacted by the digging in advance of pipeline building? There is supposed to be both environmental and social impact assessment accompanying such construction, as well as of course the evaluation of cultural resources such as archaeological and historic sites. But these are difficult to get big business to pay attention to, especially if there is no profit from them. Here is where cultural tourism can come in and motivate people to save sites, if not for the knowledge of the past, at least so they can make some money!

The Indigenismo movements in Peru and other South American countries have emphasized the native heritage, which is of course easier if you have standing impressive architecture, as is present in Peru. But all over South America, more and more, especially among educated and middle class people, preservation issues and cultural heritage provide a sense of pride in identity, an association with the great ancient past similar to that in Europe, for example. This is appealing to middle-class Latinos, even English-speaking ones in the U.S. An example is in a recent issue of Hispanic magazine (Holley 2002), where a quick summary of all Latin American prehistory is presented to show what modern science is learning about the hispanic heritage (though there is no discussion of the problems of preservation and looting). Sometimes partnerships between North American researchers and South American government agencies can work well to promote public awareness not only of the past but of the need to protect it. World awareness of the fragile evidence of the human heritage on the planet is rising slowly, but it is rising. If you check websites for different South American countries you can see more awareness of the public nature of archaeology (a good one is at http://www.dinacyt.gub.uy/proykent/hernandarias.htm for Uruguay)

We will return to these issues throughout the course, so keep them in mind for every week's topic and time period.