Amazonia

The Amazonian archaeological record is less detailed than that for the Andes. The expansion of agriculture through Amazonia and the Orinoco basin could have involved an indigenous domestication of manioc, but this is not certain and the oldest pottery from Taperinha in Brazil (Figure 8.3) appears to be associated with a hunter-gatherer population. According to Betty Meggers (1987; Meggers and Evans 1983), three main styles of pottery spread through Amazonia from the northwest, starting at about 2000 BC. She refers to these as, first, the "zoned hachure tradition," with oldest occurrences in Valdivia in Ecuador, Puerto Hormiga in Colombia, Initial Period Peru, and the site of Tutishcainyo in the upper Ucayali Valley of eastern Peru (Figure 8.4); second, the "polychrome tradition," which spread along the varzea alluvial bottomlands after 1,800 years ago, possibly from northwest Venezuela; and third, the relatively recent "incised and punctate tradition," which spread from the Orinoco Basin after 1,200 years ago.

The preference of Meggers is clearly for a downstream movement of agriculturalists and pottery traditions through Amazonia, commencing from homelands in the northwestern part of the continent, especially Colombia and the northern Andes. A related view was also favored by Julian Steward (1947), but with a greater emphasis on the Caribbean coastal regions of Venezuela and the Guianas. To the contrary, Donald Lathrap favored the central Amazon Basin itself as the source region for all Mesoamerican and South American early agricultural societies. No strong position is taken on this issue here, but the possibility that agricultural populations entered Amazonia via the upper courses of tributary rivers from the west and northwest carries conviction when examined from the viewpoint of some of the linguistic evidence (Figure 10.10), as well as the likely homeland of manioc (Olsen and Schaal 1999). The Initial Period of Peru, at least with respect to the zoned hachure pottery tradition of sites such as Kotosh (Waira-jirca phase) and Tutishcainyo, must surely be considered a potential origin for some of the early lowland pottery-using societies.

Concerning early Amazonian agricultural subsistence, Anna Roosevelt (1980)

has documented a presence of maize in the Middle Orinoco valley by about 800 Bc, preceded perhaps by manioc cultivation. But maize agriculture in general appears to have been rather non-intensive in Amazonia until about AD 1000 (Roosevelt 1999b). The expansions of agriculture and pottery into the West Indies appear to have taken place only during the later first millennium BC (Rouse 1992; Keegan 1994; Callaghan 2001). Evidence for early agriculture in Amazonia, if real, remains elusive.