Chapter 3

Steps Towards an Ecology of Landscape:

The Pedo-Stratigraphy of Anthropogenic
Dark Earths

M Arroyo-Kalin

3.1 Introduction

A posthumous festschrift to a bold mind is an apposite context to celebrate the role

that research into pre-Columbian anthropogenic dark earths has played in a momen-
tous paradigm shift in Amazonian scholarship. This shift – imprinted in the reciprocal
intersections, synergies, and oppositions of a long history of intellectual contributions
– calls for caution in addressing past and present environments exclusively as self-
regulating and equilibrium-seeking systems to which individuals or cultures adapt or
adapted to. Instead it encourages a consideration of the biotic and abiotic components
of landscapes inhabited by human communities as historically contingent outcomes
of niche-building, past and present. From an archaeological standpoint, it invites a
sharpening of focus to behold ‘past environments’ as open-ended and non-determin-
istic evolutionary trajectories of material transformation within which the emergent
surrounding-worlds that have structured the lifeways of past human communities
have been crafted step by step. Some of these steps are evident to the learned eye,
others remain to be unveiled by future research, and yet others, it is argued below, can
be ascertained in subtle material signatures that exist in anthropogenic dark earths.

3.2 The Development of Anthropogenic Dark Earths

The majority of terra preta expanses in the central Amazon region are open air
archaeological sites that track the location of pre-Columbian settlements on relatively
flat, mostly non-flooding landforms in the immediate vicinity of rivers, lakes and
streamlets (Hilbert 1968; Simões 1974; Heckenberger et al. 1999; Neves 2003). The
distinctively dark topsoil at these locales often includes abundant charcoal and
archaeological artefacts. Vertical exposures through ‘flat’ areas reveal an A horizon
of deeper reach than the surrounding soil mantle in which it is generally possible to
distinguish one or more subhorizons – A1, A2, A3 and so forth – based on subtle
contrasts in soil structure, texture, colour and inclusions. The transition from A to
underlying B horizon sediments, in turn, oftentimes appears as an AB, A/B and/or

WI Woods et al. (eds.), Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision, 33

© Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009
34 M Arroyo-Kalin

B/A sequence that shows down-mixing of enriched A horizon material into deeper B
horizon sediments. These characteristics appear to be shared by many exemplars of
anthropogenic dark earths in the tropical lowlands of northern South America (e.g.
Mora 1991; Kern 1996; Vacher et al. 1998; see Kämpf et al. 2003 for an overview).
Although it cannot be doubted that the A horizon of artefact-rich anthropogenic
dark earths, or terras pretas, is a result of the deposition and/or decomposition of
debris associated to pre-Columbian settlement dynamics (Sombroek 1966; Smith
1980; Kern and Kämpf 1989; Kern 1996; Kern et al. 2004; Woods 1995; Woods and
McCann 1999; Woods and Glaser 2004; see also Erickson 2003), to characterise the
dark and organic-rich sediments of these soils as thick A horizons that have
expanded downwards understates the exact nature of the processes that resulted in
their formation. Over 35 years ago, Lathrap (1970) vehemently defended the sug-
gestion that stratigraphic distinctions were visible or inferable in vertical sections
of Amazonian open air sites and advocated their study as an integral part of recon-
structions of pre-Columbian history (see also discussions in Eden et al. 1984;
Lathrap and Oliver 1987; Myers 2004). Echoing his remarks over two decades later,
excavations by the Central Amazon Project (Heckenberger et al. 1999; Petersen
et al. 2001; Neves 2003) show that ceramic shards found embedded in expanses of
terras pretas can be classified into distinct phases, complexes and/or traditions.
Importantly, radiocarbon dates show that ceramic phases are constrained chrono-
logically to a few hundred years yet, with some important gaps in the early part of
the first millennium AD, span in excess of 1,000 calendar years (Neves 2003;
Petersen et al. 2003; Petersen et al. 2004; Lima et al. 2006; Moraes 2006; Arroyo-
Kalin 2008).
Archaeological investigations of terra preta expanses demonstrate that single-
phase sites show a relatively thin and less strongly melanised A horizon compared to
multi-phase sites. In the latter, archaeological remains are deposited within often
thicker and darker A horizon sediments in generally ‘good’ stratigraphic order, i.e.
older artefacts are generally found underlying younger ones (Hilbert 1968; Donatti
2003; Machado 2005; Moraes 2006). It is important to highlight that the stratigraphic
integrity of these remains cannot be explained by invoking their concerted sinking as
a result of faunally-induced gravitational displacement (Darwin 1881; Johnson 1990):
not only do vertical exposures of anthropogenic dark earths lack horizontally-trans-
gressive alignments of ceramic shards that could be interpreted as analogues of
biotically-produced stone lines, but carefully-controlled excavations also frequently
record archaeological features – pits, post hole negatives, and the like – whose very
presence and edge definition contradicts the suggestion that these deposits have been
reworked by soil fauna to the point of obliterating stratigraphic distinctions. In addi-
tion, a growing body of evidence shows that broad stratigraphic contiguity can be
ascertained at the level of the expanse in different terra preta deposits (Heckenberger
et al. 1999; Rebellato 2007, and this volume Chapter 2; Arroyo-Kalin 2008).
In another chapter, my colleagues and I have summarised a series of findings,
questions and hypotheses about the composition of anthropogenic dark earths in the
central Amazon region (Arroyo-Kalin et al., this volume). In this complementary
contribution, I examine the development of these soils as an outcome of the pro-
gressive burial of subsequent land surfaces, i.e. the build-up of the soil mantle over