Professional Documents
Culture Documents
2S
Anna
Curtenius
Roosevelt
Amazon Chiefdoms
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms. Cumula
tive
evidence from archaeology and ethnohistory shows greater variety and complexity
among Amazonian Indian societies of the prehistoric and contact periods than exist
today. The ancestors of living Indians traveled a long cultural history from early for
agers who hunted with fine stone points and made rock paintings, to innovative potteryage fisherpeople and horticulturalists, and finally to the populous, wealthy, and powerf
ul
chief doms of late prehistory. This history was truncated and impoverished when
Europeans invaded and relegated Indians to ecological and societal marginality.
Indigenous Social Development in Amazonia
Amazonia has often been portrayed as a resource-poor environment that
limited the development of indigenous complex societies1. The lifeways of recent Amazonian Indians, who live in small groups subsisting
on shifting cultivation and foraging, were seen as cultural adaptations to the
humid tropical environment. Archaeological or documentary evidence for largescale native complex societies was either dismissed or attributed to short-lived
intrusions from Andean or Mesoamerican civilizations.
Quite a different picture of Amazonia is beginning to emerge from new
field work and restudy of older work. As a habitat for indigenous human
development, Amazonia seems richer and more variable than before. Plenti
ful
resources for human subsistence are found in several areas: large floodplains, extensive coasts and estuaries, and uplands with volcanics or limestone.
In such areas, the emerging human developmental sequence appears much longer
and more complex than earlier conceptions allowed, including occupations by
late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers with developed lithic technology and rock art,
some of the earliest sedentary settlement, ceramics, and horticulture in the New
World, and, in late prehistory, populous indigenous societies of substantial scale
and complexity.
L'Homme 126-128, avr.-dc. 1993, XXXIII (2-4), pp. 255-283.
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ANNA
CURTENIUS ROOSEVELT
and permanent, and the larger settlements held from several thousands to tens
of thousands of individuals or more. Unlike today, settlements at that time
seem to have been embedded within large cultural and political territories with
allegiance to paramount chiefs claiming divine origine and elaborate sumptuary
rights to emblems of office, certain resources and valuables, litters, and personal
service. The organization of the societies seems in some cases to have been ranked
or stratified in socio-political hierarchies composed of regional and local chiefs,
nobles, commoners, and subordinate individuals such as servants, client foragers
and farmers, and captive slaves. Societies engaged in military conquest with
a pattern of conflict that included large-scale organized warfare for defense and
conquest in addition to the raiding to revenge or capture of women, the most
common form of indigenous conflict today.
The economies of these societies were, unlike those of present Amazonian
Indians, complex and large-scale, including intensive food production of seed
and root crops in both mono- and polycultural fields, intensive hunting and fishing,
and long-term storage. There was considerable investment in substantial perma
nentfacilities, such as turtle corrals, fish weirs, and permanent agricultural
fields. Agriculture emphasized clear-cultivation and annual cropping more than
slash-and-burn, the main method today. In many of the chiefdoms, maize, rather
than manioc, was the staple plant. Artifacts were produced on a large scale,
and quantities of high quality decorated pottery and fabrics, as well as various
tools, edibles, and raw materials, were traded over long distances. There seem
to have been locations that functioned like markets, where intensive trading was
carried on periodically. Strings of disc beads, usually of shell, were widely used
as a medium of exchange, and semi-precious stone ornaments, such as greenstones,
were part of a system of elite gift-giving.
Regular community religious ceremonies were supplied with maize beer fur
nished
from tribute by tithes, accompanied with music, and dancing. In the lower
Amazon, several major polities had societal religious ideologies enhancing the
position of elites through the worship of deified ancestors, often female, in whose
name tribute was given. The mummies and painted images of the chief's ancestors
were curated along with stone images of deities and ritual paraphernalia in special
structures and refurbished for circulation during periodic ceremonies. There were
specialists in charge of the religious houses and ceremonies, and also diviners and
curers. Although women were not allowed to view certain ceremonies, high-ranking
female town chiefs and ritual specialists are mentioned. The sources also mention
the custom of matrilineal chiefly genealogy and rank endogamy for noble women.
In a number of the societies observed at contact, both girls and boys were sub
jected
to initiation ordeals and rituals considered as inductions to high rank.
Though by their nature, ethnohistoric accounts do not furnish definitive
evidence of social and political organization or reliable quantitative information
about subsistence or demography, the sources for Greater Amazonia contain i
ndisputable
evidence of large-scale, very populous regional societies comparable
to complex chiefdoms and small states known in other parts of the world.
261
Fig. 1. Marajoara polychrome effigy urn from Guajara mound, Marajo Island, Para State, Brazil.
C. A.D. 500-700, 29 cm diameter.
Goeldi Museum. Drawing by K. Van Dyke.
262
adernos. Both also include important new shapes, subjects, and decorative
styles, such as burial urns, human effigies, and complex three-color painting.
The Polychrome Horizon is characterized by pottery decorated mainly with
elaborate stylized geometric patterns executed in painting (usually red, black,
and white) and incision, excision, and modeling (fig. 1 et 2). Examples of
local styles are Marajoara of the mouth of the Amazon11, Guarita of the
Middle Amazon12, both in Brazil, Caimito of the Upper Amazon in Peru13,
Napo of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador14, and Araracuara of the Caqueta in
the Colombian Amazon15.
The Incised and Punctate Horizon pottery styles have abundant modeled
ornaments and dense incision and punctation. Local phases of the horizon
are Santarem of the Lower Amazon16, Itacoatiara of the Middle Amazon17,
263
both in Brazil, the late prehistoric culture of Faldas de Sangay in the Ecuadorian
Amazon18, Hertenrits of Surinam19, Camoruco and Arauquin of the Middle
Orinoco20, and Valencia of the Caribbean coast range21, all in Venezuela.
The late prehistoric horizons spread rapidly over territories comparable in
size to those of chief doms described in the historic accounts, a process
traditionally interpreted by anthropologists as evidence of the expansion of
conquest chiefdoms or states. Within the horizons there seems to have been
continuing interregional stylistic communication during much of the late pre
historic
period, possibly produced by a network of alliances, intermarriage,
and war among the elites of regional cultures.
Artifacts: Function and Iconography
The occupation sites of the Amazonian chiefdoms contain an abundance
of artifacts and other remains. The most abundant are ceramic sherds and
vessels of the horizon styles22. There must have been a high rate of production
of artifacts, which have been recovered by the thousands, despite the small
amount of excavation that has yet been done. The magnitude of archaeological
production parallels ethnohistoric evidence for intensive craft production and
trade.
Material culture in the chiefdoms seems to have been very complex, and
many different kinds of artifacts have been found: pottery vessels, effigies (fig. 3),
drug paraphernalia, musical instruments, stools, whorls, stamps, stools, pubic
covers (fig. 4), stone cutting tools, shaft-straighteners, grinders, pounders,
abraders, and ornaments of jade and other semiprecious rocks. The presence
of numerous igneous rock items in sites in purely sedimentary basins testifies
to the long-distance trade of lithics. Studies of material trace-elements and
isotopes are needed to trace the extent and history of long-distance trade in
lithics and pottery. Spindle whorls increase in numbers and types, suggesting
increasing scale and complexity of textile production. The soils occupied by
many chiefdoms are often of clayey, high pH types considered good cotton
soils, and production of this fiber may have been an important industry.
The iconography of the horizon styles may give additional evidence of the
nature of the ancient societies' organization, economies, and religion. The
art of the late prehistoric styles has an emphasis of the human image not found
earlier. Though animals are common, humans are usually larger, more central
images. The human image may have become more important when intensive
agriculture made labor and land valuable and their control a factor requiring
ideological justification. It is often found in mortuary contexts and may relate
to elite ancestral mortuary cults such as those mentioned by the conquistadors.
Male images, which are much rarer than females, are mainly represented
as shaman/chiefs, on stools, carrying rattles, wearing special hats and shoulder
bags, and as alter ego figures with an animal on their shoulders. A concept
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ANNA CURTENIUS
ROOSEVELT
WUfSKK ?
Fig. 5 . View of Marajo Island. Tall forest at center is growing on a cluster of prehistoric artifical mounds,
the Monte Carmelo mound group. 1983.
267
Fig. 6
Prehistoric food remains at a Marajoara mound, Teso dos Bichos, a) Microscopic bones from small
fish, the mainstay of the diet, and b) vertebrum from Arapaima gigas, "pirarucu", from a special
cache. 6.5 cm. c) Carbonized seed of Euterpe oleraceae palm, "acai". 1.4 cm.
identifiable plant remains24, produced significant information about subsistence
during the development of the complex societies. Crops such as maize or Indian
corn appear to enter the subsistence systems of the floodplains of Greater
Amazonia during the first millennium B.C., when there is a rather rapid increase
in size and number of archaeological sites. Stable isotope results and dental
pathologies of the late prehistoric people suggest that seed crops became quite
important between A.D. 500 and the conquest, and site sizes and numbers
continued to expand25. Faunal protein continues as a protein supplement, with
aquatic faunal remains predominating greatly over terrestrial in the floodplains,
presumably because of the high biomass and turnover rate of fish in this habitat,
compared to terrestrial animals.
In some areas, such as Marajo Island the collection and/or cultivation of
small-seed local floodplain grasses and chenopods may have preceded the
adoption of maize26. This pattern may have begun soon after the time of
Christ there. Prehistoric skeletons and food remains dating between A.D. 400
and 1100 indicate a cereal staple, supplemented with small fish, but the bone
chemistry indicates levels of maize consumption at only 20 to 30% of the
1 1
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Fig. 9. Superimposed house floors in looters pit at Camutins mound, Os Camutins site.
Fig. 10 a
F/g. 10 b
.F/g. 10. Baked clay cooking stoves at Teso dos Bichos, c. A.D. 800:
a) top view; b) side view.
273
meters. Many floodplain occupation sites are artificial earthen mounds com
posed of numerous superimposed building stages and ruined earthen constructions
(fig. 7-10). Though small, simple sites are the most numerous, many of the
large sites appear to be complex, multi-function deposits, with special purpose
craft areas, such as jewelry or stone tool manufacturing areas, ceremonial areas,
defensive earthworks, cemeteries and mounds, domestic activity areas, and the
remains of substantial domestic structures and facilities, such as dwellings and
stoves. Only a few of these large, complex sites have yet been comprehensively
investigated. Though most general sources refer to prehistoric Amazonian settl
ements as non-urban, the late prehistoric Amazonian archaeological sites and
earthworks are unexpectedly substantial and complex.
Large-scale mound-building cultures developed in several areas of Greater
Amazonia: the Llanos de Mojos and Chiquitos of the Bolivian Amazon28, the
uplands of the Ecuadorian Amazon29, Marajo Island at the Mouth of the
Amazon30, the coastal plain of the Guianas31, and the Middle Orinoco32.
Many earthworks in these areas include raised and ditched fields, dikes, canals,
wells, ponds, causeways, roads, and mounds for habitation and burial. Mounds
were raised either by heaping up thick layers of soil from borrow pits or by
the gradual accumulation of refuse and ruined adobe buildings. Some of the
habitats of the mound cultures have deep seasonal flooding, and year-round
settlements must be raised out of the water. However, many of these mounds
were built up many meters higher than flood-levels of the time, which suggests
that they may have been raised for defense or display. Little systematic survey
of earthworks has been done, and many have been covered up by sedimentation
on the floodplains.
The scale and extent of the Amazonian earthworks and occupation sites
are extraordinary. Many mounds are from 3 to 10 meters in height and several
hectares in area. Some multimound sites on Marajo Island are more than
10 square kilometers in area with from 20 to 40 individual mounds, and a multimound site in the uplands of the Ecuadorian Amazon has an area of 12 square
kilometers. Even the archaeological sites produced only by accretion of living
refuse make up an appreciable part of the landsurface along the Amazon and
Orinoco riverbanks. These late prehistoric archaeological deposits are massive
and often continuous for miles and are densely packed with artifacts and
carbonized plant remains.
The massive dwelling sites indicate a prehistoric occupation much more
substantial and sedentary than the slight, nomadic occupation earlier envisioned
for Amazonia. Such sites cannot be explained as accretions from long periods
of sparse, shifting habitation, for the chronologies indicate that they accrued
rapidly, with periods of several hundred years represented by several meters
of refuse in some cases. In many regions these sites represent prehistoric
populations that were apparently much larger c. A.D. 1500 than present-day
indigenous populations of Amazonia. According to hearth counts and
comparisons with world-wide averages of site area per population, not a few
274
Amazonian sites represent populations of several thousand and a few are large
enough to have had populations in the tens of thousands at least.
Many large cemeteries with hundreds of burials have been found in habitation
sites and mounds. The majority are spatially concentrated urn cemeteries, but
some earthen shaft tombs with stone covers with urn burials have been found
as well. The elaborate and varied burial assemblages in these cemeteries are
thought to represent significant interpersonal differences in rank. Because of
protection in the covered urns and the near-neutral pH of soil, human skeletal
remains are commonly quite well-preserved33 (fig. 11). Few of them have been
recorded or analyzed, but those in museums and private collections reveal highly
differentiated populations with a range of age, sex, disease, physiological
condition, and bone chemistry. Despite the potential socioeconomic information
the vast cemeteries could yield, no prehistoric Amazonian cemetery has yet been
studied systematically by a physical anthropologist.
Thus the scale and complexity of settlement and construction in the late
prehistoric societies of Greater Amazonia are more like societies identified as
complex chiefdoms and "primitive" states elsewhere in the world than to the
settlements of the present Indians of Amazonia.
The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms
Earlier anthropologists projected the ethnographic picture of Amazonia into
prehistoric times as the characteristic adaptation to Amazonian environ
ments. When more complex archaeological manifestations were recognised,
these were interpreted as short-lived invasions from the Andean or Mesoamerican
civilizations, which decayed rapidly in the tropical environment. The new
archaeological evidence, however, suggests the presence for more than a thousand
years of populous complex societies of indigenous origins, with urban-scale settl
ements, intensive subsistence and craft-production systems, and rituals and
ideologies linked to systems of social hierarchy and political centralization.
The new information about Amazonian prehistory documents a sequence
of much more complex social, demographic, economic, and ecological change
than we had realized. The evidence for early cultural innovations in Amazonia,
such as initial pottery and sedentism, and horticulture, suggests that our previous
notions of geography of indigenous cultural development in South America
need to be revised. The discovery of correlations between the development
of complex cultures and significant shifts in demography and subsistence prepares
the way for understanding these cultures in both ecological and historical context.
Given the widespread occurrence of such societies and their long-term
persistence, it seems unlikely that the habitat was too poor to support them,
and, indeed, environmental studies suggest that there were plentiful
resources. Their demise, instead, seems correlated with the European conquest
of the Americas. The conquerors defeated the native chiefdoms and replaced
Fig. 11. Male cranium with cribra orbitalia anemia pathology, from Marajo Island.
The bun-shaped occiput is a morphological feature common in Amazonian populations.
Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro.
275
276
NOTES
1. Meggers 1954, 1971; Steward 1949.
2. Boomert 1980a; Bryan 1978, 1983; Bryan et al. 1978; Evans & Meggers 1960; Miller 1987;
Roosevelt 1989a, 1989b, 1991, and n.d.; Roosevelt et al. 1991, 1992; Schmitz 1987, 1991; Simoes
1976, 1981.
3. Holmberg 1969; Hurtado & Hill 1991.
4. Roosevelt, n.d.
5. Boomert 1983; Meggers & Evans 1961, 1983; Lathrap 1970; Cruxent & Rouse 1958-1959;
Roosevelt 1980; Rouse & Cruxent 1963; Rouse & Allaire 1978.
6. Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971.
7. Roosevelt 1980; Van der Merwe et al. 1981.
8. Steward 1949.
9. e.g. Meggers & Evans 1957.
10. e.g. Bettendorf 1910; de Heriarte 1964; Daniel 1840-1841; Palmatary 1950, 1960; Fritz 1922;
Markham 1859; Myers 1973, 1974; Rowe, ed., 1952; Denevan 1966, 1976; Meggers 1971;
Lathrap 1970; Acuna 1891; Gumilla 1955; Medina, ed., 1934; Carvajal 1892; Castellanos
1955; Bezerra de Meneses 1972; Morey 975; Porro 1989; other references summarized in
Roosevelt 1980, 1987.
11. Meggers & Evans 1957; Roosevelt 1991.
12. Hilbert 1968.
13. Lathrap 1970; Weber 1975.
14. Evans & Meggers 1968.
15. Herrera et al. 1983; Eden et al. 1984.
16. Palmatary 1960; Bezerra de Meneses 1972.
17. Hilbert 1959, 1968.
18. Athens 1989; Porras 1987.
19. Boomert 1976, 1980b.
20. Petrullo 1939; Roosevelt 1980, 1992.
21. Kidder 1944.
277
22. Rouse & Cruxent 1963; Nordenskiold 1924a, 1930; Lathrap 1970; Meggers 1947; Meggers
& Evans 1957, 1961, 1983; Hilbert 1968; Palmatary 1950, 1960; Roosevelt 1980, 1991, 1992.
23. Cohen & Armelagos, eds., 1984.
24. Roosevelt 1980, 1984, 1989a, 1989b; Roosevelt et al. 1991; Wing, Garson & Simons, n.d.;
Garson 1980; Smith & Roosevelt, n.d.
25. Van der Merwe et al. 1981; Roosevelt 1989a.
26. Brochado [1980]; Roosevelt 1991, Tabl. 6. 7.
27. Hames & Vickers, eds., 1983.
28. Erickson 1980; Nordenskiold 1913, 1916, 1924a, 1924b; Denevan 1966.
29. Porras 1987.
30. Derby 1879; Meggers & Evans 1957; Roosevelt 1991.
31. Boomert 1976, 1980b.
32. Castellanos 1955; Cruxent 1952, 1966; Rouse & Cruxent 1963; Cruxent & Rouse 1958-1959;
Devenan & Zucchi 1978.
33. Greene [1986].
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RSUM
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, Dveloppement et disparition des chefferies amazoniennes.
Les donnes de l'archologie et de Pethnohistoire montrent que les socits indignes
amazoniennes taient bien plus labores et diffrencies, dans les temps prcolombiens,
qu'elles ne le sont aujourd'hui. Des industries lithiques raffines et des gravures rupestres
des anciens chasseurs-cueilleurs aux traditions cramiques novatrices des premires socits
riveraines et horticoles, puis l'mergence des chefferies puissantes, riches et densment
peuples de la prhistoire tardive, le parcours historique des Amrindiens des basses terres
a t long et complexe. Cette trajectoire a t tronque puis appauvrie par l'invasion euro
penne qui a relgu les Indiens dans la marginalit cologique et sociale.
RESUMEN
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, Desarrollo y desaparicin de las jefacturas amaznicas.
Los datos de la arqueologa y la etnohistoria muestran como en la poca precolombina,
las sociedades indgenas amaznicas estaban mucho mas elaboradas y diferenciadas que hoy.
De las refinadas industrias lticas y los gravados rupestres de los antiguos cazadores-recolectores
a las tradiciones de cermica innovadoras de las primeras sociedades ribereas y hortcolas,
luego a la emergencia de las jefacturas ricas y densamente pobladas de la prehistoria tardia,
la evolucin histrica de los Amerindios de las tierras bajas ha sido larga y compleja. Esta
trayectoria fue trocada y empobrecida por la invasin europea, la cual releg a los Indios
a la marginalidad ecolgica y social.