Michael J. Heckenberger

University of Florida | UF · Department of Anthropology

Amazonian dark earth (ADE) is highly nutrient- and carbon-rich soil created by past inhabitants of the Amazon. It would be valuable to know the extent of ADE because of its cultural and environmental importance, but systematic efforts to map its distribution and extent are impractical with traditional field methods. We use remote-sensing imagery an...

The expansion of globalized industrial societies is causing global warming, ecosystem degradation, and species and language extinctions worldwide. Mainstream conservation efforts still focus on nature protection strategies to revert this crisis, often overlooking the essential roles of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IP&LC) in protecting...

Fertile soil known as Amazonian dark earth is central to the debate over the size and ecological impact of ancient human populations in the Amazon. Dark earth is typically associated with human occupation, but it is uncertain whether it was created intentionally. Dark earth may also be a substantial carbon sink, but its spatial extent and carbon in...

The nature and extent of past indigenous transformations in the Amazon basin is an actively debated topic, and one that has important implications for both conservation policy and the cultural heritage of its indigenous and traditional populations. The use of charcoal and phytoliths to measure past human impacts in non-lacustrine settings has becom...

Human-landscape interactions have influenced the carbon cycle in numerous ways since the industrial revolution, but the role of human activities in the ancient world is less well known. One example is the Amazon region, one of the most important terrestrial carbon reservoirs, where the size of ancient human populations and the extent of their impac...

This Report provides a comprehensive, objective, open, transparent, systematic, and rigorous scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon’s ecosystems, current trends, and their implications for the long-term well-being of the region, as well as opportunities and policy relevant options for conservation and sustainable development.

Archaeological research provides clear evidence that the widespread formation of Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) in tropical lowland South America was concentrated in the Late Holocene, an outcome of sharp demographic growth that peaked towards 1000 BP. In their recent paper, however, Silva et al. propose that the high fertility of ADE is not of anthr...

ADE, a result of domestic, economic, and agricultural activities in and around human settlements, are noted for their extraordinary fertility and resilience and for the significant quantities of organic carbon, much in the form of charcoal. The deepest and most extensive areas of ADE are generally located on the bluffs of major rivers adjacent to f...

Amazonian dark earth (ADE) has received global attention for its remarkable fertility and high carbon content in a region known for low-nutrient soils. ADE is an anthropic soil produced by human activities, including refuse disposal and crop cultivation, that concentrated charcoal, organic matter and nutrients. Evidence for modified soils reaches b...

This study explores how indigenous knowledge (IK) might be retained and/or changed among contemporary indigenous peoples. Through semi-structured interviews and quantitative analyses of long-term changes in artistic knowledge among three geographically displaced Kaiabi (Kawaiwete) we found an association between language proficiency and gender with...

Sustainability science focuses on generating and applying knowledge to environmentally sound human development around the world. It requires working toward greater integration of different types of knowledge, ways of knowing, and between academy and society. We contribute to the development of approaches for learning from indigenous knowledge, thro...

In his Policy Forum “Brazilian politics threaten environmental policies” (19 August, p. [746][1]), P. M. Fearnside discusses the risks that recent environmental policy reforms pose to the conservation of Amazonian biodiversity. He calls for continued input by the scientific community but fails

We thank McMichael et al . for commenting on our recent review [[1][1]]. They focus on: our misinterpretation of their published data; use of data that is not pre-Conquest; and the extrapolative nature of our review. As they point out, we agree with them about heterogeneous landscape domestication

During the twentieth century, Amazonia was widely regarded as relatively pristine nature, little impacted by human history. This view remains popular despite mounting evidence of substantial human influence over millennial scales across the region. Here, we review the evidence of an anthropogenic Amazonia in response to claims of sparse populations...

Os estudos de sustentabilidade no século XXI reconhecem amplamente que os vínculos teóricos e práticos entre ciências naturais e sociais são necessários para se entender a dinâmica de sistemas humano-naturais, especialmente na escala de séculos e milênios. A arqueologia e estudos congêneres sobre a história local indígena têm um papel crucial para...

The recent article ‘Ash salts and bodily affects: Witoto environmental knowledge as sexual education’ (Echeverri and Román-Jitdutjaãno 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 015008) considers indigenous people and their distinctive knowledge systems in the western Amazon. These complex systems provide richly detailed practical knowledge about life in these tro...

This chapter complements chapter 50 and discusses the likely migration histories of the Tupi, Carib, Je, and Arawak language families within the past three thousand years. It also describes the characteristic social features of the ethnolinguistic populations associated with these families. Keywords: archaeology; New World prehistory; Holocene; S...

This chapter considers articulations, points of contact, and disarticulations, distortions, and other "disconnects" between virtual realities both of urban planning and mass media and on-the-ground or "lived" realities of human subjects whose identities and subjectivities are constructed in place, in this case, in Centro, São Paulo. It stems from a...

Background/Question/Methods Utilizing an integrated approach to data collection, ongoing research in the Upper Xingu basin of the Amazon has provided new perspective on the relationship of prehistoric indigenous populations and the environments in which they lived. Results/Conclusions Centuries of Western scientific thought have promoted ideas o...

Amazonian archaeology has made major advances in recent decades, particularly in understanding coupled human environmental systems. Like other tropical forest regions, prehistoric social formations were long portrayed as small-scale, dispersed communities that differed lit-tle in organization from recent indigenous societies and had negligi-ble imp...

The Amazon tropical forest is not as wild as it looks.

Nukak: Ethnoarchaeology of an Amazonian People, by PolitisGustavo, 2007, translated by AlbertoBenjamin. Walnut Creek (CA): Left Coast Press; ISBN 978-1-59874-229-9 hardback £38 & US$52; ISBN 978-1-59874-230-2 paperback £24 & US$32; 411 pp., 108 figs., 24 tables - Volume 19 Issue 3 - Michael Heckenberger

Nature is the international weekly journal of science: a magazine style journal that publishes full-length research papers in all disciplines of science, as well as News and Views, reviews, news, features, commentaries, web focuses and more, covering all branches of science and how science impacts upon all aspects of society and life.

Recent studies in Amazonia historical ecology have revealed substantial diversity and dynamic change in coupled natural human systems. In the southern Amazon, several headwater basins show evidence of substantial pre-Columbian landscape modification, particularly in areas historically dominated by speakers of the Arawak language family. The headwat...

Amazonia is a region known for large expanses of acid, infertile soils difficult to farm without considerable inputs of fertilizer or long fallow periods. In this same region, scattered patches of fertile black soil also exist that are highly sought after by farmers for planting nutrient-demanding crops. These areas are the result of the activities...

The archaeology of pre-Columbian polities in the Amazon River basin forces a reconsideration of early urbanism and long-term change in tropical forest landscapes. We describe settlement and land-use patterns of complex societies on the eve of European contact (after 1492) in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. These societies were organ...

Identity is one of anthropology’s oldest and favorite topics of inquiry. Interests have bounced between polemic ideas of primordial conditions, biology, descent, and natural communities to those of situation and contingency, alliance, and imagined communities. Identity in cultural anthropology is most commonly viewed as a sense of self or self-awar...

This volume represents part of an unprecedented and still growing effort to advance, coordinate and disseminate the scientific documentation of endangered languages. As the pace of language extinction increases, linguists and native communities are accelerating their efforts to speak, remember, record, analyze and archive as much as possible of our...

For centuries Amazonia has held the Western scientific and popular imagination as a primordial forest, only minimally impacted by small, simple and dispersed groups that inhabit the region. Studies in historical ecology refute this view. Rather than pristine tropical forest, some areas are better viewed as constructed or 'domesticated' landscapes,...

Not so long ago, most anthropologists held a view of pre-Columbian Amazonian peoples as fairly uniform across the region and roughly identical to 20th century ethnographic groups- a view based on very scanty direct evidence. Attention was therefore directed at contemporary social forms and singlesited ethnography, which seemed well suited to studyi...

In 1884 a community of Brazilians was "discovered" by the Western world. The Ecology of Power examines these indigenous people from the Upper Xingu region, a group who even today are one of the strongest examples of long-term cultural continuity. Drawing upon written and oral history, ethnography, and archaeology, Heckenberger addresses the difficu...

We present here chronological data on the timing and rate of terra preta formation at three archaeological sites located near the confluence of the Negro and Solimões Rivers, in the central Amazon of Brazil. We have been studying pre-Columbian indigenous archaeology in this area since 1995 within the framework of the Central Amazon Project (CAP) (e...

Archaeology and indigenous history of Native Amazonian peoples in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil reveal unexpectedly complex regional settlement patterns and large-scale transformations of local landscapes over the past millennium. Mapping and excavation of archaeological structures document pronounced human-induced alteration of the forest cover...

[English] Meggers's critique of views presented by DeBoer et al. (1996), Wüst and Barreto (1999), and Heckenberger et al. (1999) in Latin American Antiquity misrepresents these authors and others. Her criticisms, largely directed at the present authors, obfuscate fundamental points raised regarding the nature and variability of cultural formations...

Recent archaeological investigations along the lower Negro and upper Xingu Rivers in the Brazilian Amazon provide important new evidence bearing on long-standing debates about the size and permanence of Amerindian settlements in the region. Preliminary regional surveys and more in-depth study of selected large (30-50 ha) sites, particularly analyse...

Agricultural productivity and Amazonian settlement The nature of Pre-Columbian agricultural systems in Amazonia has stimulated considerable debate, specifically: can one or another cultigen — maize or manioc — provide a stable agricultural base for sedentism and population growth (eg. Carneiro 1961; 1986; Gross 1975; Meggers 1996; Roosevelt 1980)?...

Este artigo apresenta subsídios arqueológicos para o debate - revisitado por Franciso Noelli, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro e Greg Urban nas páginas da Revista de Antropologia - sobre a suposta origem das línguas do tronco Tupí na Amazônia central. Apresentamos aqui os resultados preliminares de nossas pesquisas arqueológicas na área de confluência do...

A descriptive analysis was conducted on 15 ceramic artifacts excavated in 1903 from the Las Huacas cemetery site on the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. The results are presented here together with a brief discussion of site and burial context at Las Huacas. An additional 59 small globular vessels excavated by workmen from Las Huacas during Hartman'...

The Boucher site is a prehistoric cemetery in northwestern Vermont. Radiocarbon dates, which range between ca. 700 BC-AD 100, and cross-dated artifacts from the site allow clear attribution of the site to the Middlesex burial complex of the Early Woodland period. Recent analyses of artifacts and mortuary practices at the site have produced unique d...