Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Roosevelt 1993
Roosevelt 1993
Roosevelt Anna Curtenius. The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n°126-128. La remontée
de l'Amazone. pp. 255-283;
doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/hom.1993.369640
https://www.persee.fr/doc/hom_0439-4216_1993_num_33_126_369640
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age fisherpeople and horticulturalists, and finally to the populous, wealthy, and
powerful chief doms of late prehistory. This history was truncated and impoverished when
Europeans invaded and relegated Indians to ecological and societal marginality.
Between 1000 B.C. and 1000 A.D. significant changes occurred in the size,
organization, and functions of indigenous societies in some areas of Amazonia.
Transformations occurred in craft production, economy, demography, and social
and political forms, leading to the conclusion that along the mainstreams, deltas,
and piedmonts of Amazonia, there came into being that anthropologists call
complex chief doms.
The historical accounts and archaeological remains document the presence
of these complex societies along the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and the foothills
of the Andes and Caribbean ranges. The domains of these societies were very
large, sometimes tens of thousands of square kilometers in size, and these were
sometimes unified under paramount chiefs. Populations were densely
aggregated, and some settlements held many thousands of people. There was large-
scale building of earthworks for water control, agriculture, habitation, transport,
and defence. Reportedly warlike and expansionist, some societies had
hierarchical social organization supported by tribute and subsistence based on intensive
cropping and foraging. Crafts were highly developed for ceremony and trade
and linked by widespread styles emphasizing human images in addition to the
traditional animals and geometries, and there was a widespread cult of worship
of the bodies and idols of chiefly ancestors. Within 100-200 years of conquest,
however, the complex societies and their populations had vanished from the major
floodplains and piedmonts, and nothing even remotely like them is found among
the present indigenous societies of Amazonia. The complex societies' lack of
representation among present-day indigenous societies in Amazonia led at first
to a general lack of recognition among scholars that they had existed8. When
indubitable evidence was later found in archaeological finds and ethnohistoric
documents, the presence of such societies in the "tropical forest" were attributed
to influence or invasions from the Andes9. However, the results of work to
date do not support a foreign origin for these societies, whose earliest forms are
found in the eastern lowlands of Brazil, not near the Andes. Their origin must
therefore be sought in local processes of demographic and economic growth,
competition, and sociopolitical interaction.
The records of the conquest period of Amazonia, from the mid sixteenth
through eighteenth centuries, found in commentaries, transcriptions, facsimiles,
and translations10 give a picture of the late prehistoric and early historic complex
societies.
According to the records, the Indians were very densely settled along the banks
and floodplains of the major rivers. Quantitative estimates vary, but it seems
clear that along much of the mainstream Amazon, settlement was continuous
260 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
permanent facilities, 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
furnished 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
subjected 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
indisputable evidence of large-scale, very populous regional societies comparable
to complex chiefdoms and small states known in other parts of the world.
The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms 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 ANNA CURTENIUS ROOSEVELT
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,
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
prehistoric period, possibly produced by a network of alliances, intermarriage,
and war among the elites of regional cultures.
The archaeological phases of the late prehistoric horizon styles seem to occur
in characteristic kinds of biomes, such as the piedmonts and major floodplains
of rivers carrying sediment eroded from the mountains. The major mound-
building complexes are found in the broadest expanses of recent alluvium, in
the plains of the Bolivian Amazon, the Apure Delta of the Middle Orinoco,
Guiana coastal plains, and Marajo Island at the mouth of the Amazon (fig. 5).
The archaeological phases of the resource-poor interfluvial areas of the region
seem to lack the cultural complexity and magnitude of the floodplain phases
with certain important exceptions. The exceptions are the interfluvial regions
distinguished by geological deposits that have enriched local soils with nutrients,
such as the Caribbean Coastal range in Venezuela, and the Andean foothills
in the Upper Amazon and western Orinoco. Little work has been done in
the interfluves, however, and there is still the possibility that anthropologists
have found more substantial archaeological remains along the main rivers and
Andean foothills only because these areas are more accessible for research. To
investigate the role of environmental factors in the rise of lowland complex
societies, it will be important in the future to compare the prehistoric occupation
of a variety of regions.
Anthropologists have often assumed that the manioc, fish, game pattern
of indigenous subsistence today was also the major exploitation system of the
entire prehistoric period. However, this idea was based on the assumption
that the present ethnographic pattern is representative of the ancient pattern
and that the Amazonian environment was too poor for intensive agricultural
exploitation. What some of the new archaeological findings show is that many
of the late prehistoric societies of the floodplains of Amazonia had highly
266 ANNA CURTENIUS ROOSEVELT
WUfSKKí ?
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.
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.
diet. The small seed economy may have been a local development, rather than
a diffused economy, as it seems to have been in the prehistoric seed-cropping
economy of the Southeastern United States.
The late prehistoric subsistence patterns contrast with current Amazonian
ethnographic subsistence, which focuses on starchy crops supplemented with
fish and game27. The dislocations and depopulation of the historic period
apparently brought a return to the less intensive root crop and animal capture
economies of the early prehistoric period. The shifting cultivation, hunting,
270 ANNA CURTENIUS ROOSEVELT
Fig. 8. Map of Marajoara mound at Guajara of the Monte Carmelo mound group,
near Os Camutins, c. A.D. 500-1300.
The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms 271
Fig. 9. Superimposed house floors in looters pit at Camutins mound, Os Camutins site.
Settlement Patterns
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.
The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms 273
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.
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.
276 ANNA CURTENIUS ROOSEVELT
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 Í975; 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.
The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms 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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The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms 283
RÉSUMÉ
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, Développement et disparition des chefferies amazoniennes.
— Les données de l'archéologie et de Pethnohistoire montrent que les sociétés indigènes
amazoniennes étaient bien plus élaborées et différenciées, dans les temps précolombiens,
qu'elles ne le sont aujourd'hui. Des industries lithiques raffinées et des gravures rupestres
des anciens chasseurs-cueilleurs aux traditions céramiques novatrices des premières sociétés
riveraines et horticoles, puis à l'émergence des chefferies puissantes, riches et densément
peuplées de la préhistoire tardive, le parcours historique des Amérindiens des basses terres
a été long et complexe. Cette trajectoire a été tronquée puis appauvrie par l'invasion
européenne qui a relégué les Indiens dans la marginalité écologique et sociale.
RESUMEN
Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, Desarrollo y desaparición de las jefacturas amazónicas. —
Los datos de la arqueología y la etnohistoria muestran como en la época precolombina,
las sociedades indígenas amazónicas estaban mucho mas elaboradas y diferenciadas que hoy.
De las refinadas industrias líticas y los gravados rupestres de los antiguos cazadores-recolectores
a las tradiciones de cerámica innovadoras de las primeras sociedades ribereñas y hortícolas,
luego a la emergencia de las jefacturas ricas y densamente pobladas de la prehistoria tardia,
la evolución histórica de los Amerindios de las tierras bajas ha sido larga y compleja. Esta
trayectoria fue trocada y empobrecida por la invasión europea, la cual relegó a los Indios
a la marginalidad ecológica y social.