Indigenous Soil Management and the Creation of Amazonian Dark Earths: Implications of Kayapó Practice

Hecht, Susanna B.

doi:10.1007/1-4020-2597-1_18

Cited by 77 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…Terra mulata is thought to have been formed through intensive agricultural practices involving low intensity burning and mulching (Sombroek, 1966;Woods and McCann, 1999;McCann et al, 2001;Denevan, 2001Denevan, , 2004Denevan, , 2006Mora, 2006). While some researchers have provided evidence of present day analogues of ADE formation through agriculture, both in Amazonia (Hecht and Posey, 1989;Hecht, 2003), on the coast of French Guiana (Rosaine, 2008) and in West Africa (Leach and Fairhead, 1995;Fairhead and Scoones, 2005), the matter remains largely unresolved. This means that despite ADE being associated with agricultural potential today, evidence 2 of their use for agriculture in the preColumbian era is still lacking (but for a promising start see Arroyo-Kalin, 2008a).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dark Earths and manioc cultivation in Central Amazonia: a window on pre-Columbian agricultural systems?

Fraser

Clement

2008

Bol. Mus. Para. Emílio Goeldi. Ciênc. hum.

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Many commentators highlight the fertility of Anthropogenic Dark Earths (ADE), emphasizing their potential for sustainable agriculture. Some scholars believe that terra mulata (the less fertile, more extensive form of ADE) was created by means of agricultural practices used by large settled populations of pre-Columbian farmers. But what was it that these Amerindian farmers were growing? Until recently, scholarly consensus held that manioc does not perform well on ADE. New research on the middle Madeira River is showing, however, that this consensus was premature. In this region, the most common crop in ADE fields is bitter manioc. Farmers there have various landraces of manioc that they believe yield particularly well on ADE, and logically plant more of these varieties on ADE. Aspects of the behaviour and perception of manioc cultivation among 52 farmers at the community of Barro Alto were measured quantitatively on four terra firme soil types (Terra Preta, Terra Mulata, Oxisols and Ultisols). These farmers plant different configurations of landraces in different soils, according to their perception of the suitability of particular landraces and their characteristics to certain soil types and successional processes. This, in turn, shapes selective pressures on these varieties, as new genetic material incorporated from volunteer seedlings is more likely to contain traits present in the most prevalent landrace(s) in each soil type. Owing to localized population pressure at Barro Alto, manioc is under more intensive cultivation systems, with shorter cropping periods (5-10 months) and shorter fallow periods (1-2 years). The outcome of these processes is different co-evolutionary dynamics on ADE as opposed to non-anthropogenic soils. Further anthropological study of manioc swiddening in one of the richest agricultural environments in Amazonia can fill a gap in the literature, thus opening an additional window on the pre-Columbian period.Keywords: Anthropogenic soils. Dark Earths. Agricultural Intensification. Manioc. Central Amazonia. Madeira River.Resumo: Muitos comentaristas realçam a fertilidade da Terra Preta de Índio (TPI), enfatizando seu potencial para uma agricultura sustentável. Alguns estudiosos acreditam que Terra Mulata (uma forma menos fértil, porém mais comum de TPI) foi criada por meio de práticas agrícolas usadas por grandes populações sedentárias na época pré-colombiana. Mas o que estes agricultores ameríndios cultivavam? Até recentemente, o consenso acadêmico era de que mandioca não se adaptava bem em TPI. Novas pesquisas no Médio Rio Madeira estão demostrando, porém, que este consenso era prematuro. Nesta região, a colheita mais comum em roças de TPI é mandioca amarga. Os agricultores têm diversas variedades crioulas (raças primitivas) de mandioca, que eles acreditam render especialmente bem em TPI e, logicamente, plantam mais destas variedades em TPI. Aspectos do comportamento e da percepção do cultivo de mandioca entre 52 agricultores da comunidade de Barro Alto foram observados quantita...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dark Earths and manioc cultivation in Central Amazonia: a window on pre-Columbian agricultural systems?

Fraser

Clement

2008

Bol. Mus. Para. Emílio Goeldi. Ciênc. hum.

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“…Such large amounts of black carbon can only originate from incompletely combusted biomass carbon, such as wood from kitchen fires or possibly from in-field burning (Smith, 1980;Hecht, 2003). This chapter considers the beneficial effects of this bio-char soil management system and discusses opportunities for applying such management within a sustainable system that can be called "slash-and-char," as well as within other smallholder agricultural systems.…”

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confidence: 99%

Bio-Char Soil Management on Highly Weathered Soils in the Humid Tropics

Lehmann¹,

Rondón²

2006

Biological Approaches to Sustainable Soil Systems

303

185

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“…The organic black and brown earths of upland Amazonia (Amazonian Dark Earths), typically the result of prehistoric agriculture and settlement, are actually much more fertile than surrounding soils not so utilized and subjected to management over time (Erickson 2003;Hecht 2003;Hecht and Posey 1989;Lehmann et al 2003;McCann, Woods, and Meyer 2001;WinklerPrins 2001;Woods and McCann 1999;see also Denevan, chapter 5, Erickson and Balée, chapter 7, and Heckenberger, chapter 10, this volume).…”

Section: Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understanding the human role in the creation and maintenance of this uniqueness is a central goal of historical ecology. This approach involves the study of human effects on other life-forms, wherever they exist; historic changes in cultures due to these effects; and continuing (i.e., ethnographically documented) human effects on nature, sometimes in ways that increase the complexity and heterogeneity of the landscape through phenomena such as enhanced soils (Hecht 2003;Hecht and Posey 1989;Lehmann et al 2003;McCann, Woods, and Meyer 2001;WinklerPrins 2001;Woods and McCann 1999), hydrology (Erickson, chapter 8, this volume; Raffles 2002), and species composition (Balée 1998b; see also Stahl, chapter 4, and Erickson and Balée, chapter 7, this volume).Historical ecology is associated with some of the tenets of the new ecology (Botkin 1990; Little 1999;Scoones 1999; Zimmerer 1994; Zimmerer and Young 1999) such as "non-equilibrium dynamics, spatial and temporal variation, complexity, and uncertainty" (Scoones 1999:479). It does not brandish the ecosystem concept (cf.…”

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confidence: 99%

Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology

Balée¹,

Erickson²

2006

192

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HISTORICAL ECOLOGY IS a powerful perspective for understanding the complex historical relationship between human beings and the biosphere. The present volume proceeds from the axiom that humanity in its historic paths across earth has interceded in material and measurable ways in a biotic world that evolved previously by natural selection and other evolutionary forces, and that the changes thus imposed on nature have in turn been reflected in human cultures, societies, and languages through time. In effect, historical ecology encompasses the view that wherever humans have trodden, the natural environment is somehow different, sometimes in barely perceptible ways, sometimes in dramatic ways. The authors in this volume have been trained in various disciplines, including anthropology (especially the subdisciplines of archaeology and sociocultural anthropology), geography, plant genetics, integrative biology, and general ecology, and they recognize the interdependence of these fields in attempting to comprehend the effects and countereffects of human behavior in the lowlands of the New World Tropics (Neotropics). The Neotropics are the torrid zone of the New World, and the lowlands within them are tropical in climate, moist, usually heavily forested, and at altitudes below approximately 500 meters. As shown in this volume's case studies, the neotropical lowlands exhibit classic anthropogenic or cultural landscapes formed over thousands of years.Historical ecology is an interdisciplinary approach. It focuses on the historical landscape, a multidimensional physical entity that has both spatial and temporal characteristics and has been modified by human activity such that human intentions and actions can be inferred, if not read as material culture, from it. WILLIAM BALÉE AND CLARK L. ERICKSONThe landscape is like a text, but not one that is readily accessible to historians' and epigraphers' methods because it is not written in a decipherable script, but rather is inscribed in a subtle, physical sense by learned, patterned behavior and action-what anthropologists traditionally refer to as culture. Culture is physically embedded and inscribed in the landscape as nonrandom patterning, often a palimpsest of continuous and discontinuous inhabitation by past and present peoples. In contrast to text-based approaches, the historical perspective taken by practitioners of historical ecology also includes prehistory. This version of historical ecology is explicitly people centered or anthropocentric, in contrast to other human-environmental approaches that tend to reify extrahuman and noncultural phenomena, such as natural selection, kin selection, self-organization, climate change in prehistory, ecosystemic change in prehistory, and ongoing randomness of pattern and event in the environment (Botkin 1990; Egan and Howell 2001a, 2001b;Gunn 1994;Kohler and Gumerman 2000;Winterhalder 1994). Our historical ecology also stands in sharp contrast to the neoenvironmental determinism popular in archaeology today (deMenocal 2001;Fagan 199...

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Indigenous Soil Management and the Creation of Amazonian Dark Earths: Implications of Kayapó Practice

Cited by 77 publications

References 19 publications

Dark Earths and manioc cultivation in Central Amazonia: a window on pre-Columbian agricultural systems?

Dark Earths and manioc cultivation in Central Amazonia: a window on pre-Columbian agricultural systems?

Bio-Char Soil Management on Highly Weathered Soils in the Humid Tropics

Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology

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