Pre-Columbian fire management and control of climate-driven floodwaters over 3,500 years in southwestern Amazonia

Duncan, Neil A., Loughlin, Nicholas J. D., Walker, John H., Hocking, Emma and Whitney, Bronwen (2021) Pre-Columbian fire management and control of climate-driven floodwaters over 3,500 years in southwestern Amazonia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118 (40). e2022206118. ISSN 0027-8424

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Abstract

In landscapes that support economic and cultural activities, human communities actively manage environments and environmental change at a variety of spatial scales that complicate the effects of continental-scale climate. Here, we demonstrate how hydrological conditions were modified by humans against the backdrop of Holocene climate change in southwestern Amazonia. Paleoecological investigations (phytoliths, charcoal, pollen, diatoms) of two sediment cores extracted from within the same permanent wetland, ∼22 km apart, show a 1,500-y difference in when the intensification of land use and management occurred, including raised field agriculture, fire regime, and agroforestry. Although rising precipitation is well known during the mid to late Holocene, human actions manipulated climate-driven hydrological changes on the landscape, revealing differing histories of human landscape domestication. Environmental factors are unable to account for local differences without the mediation of human communities that transformed the region to its current savanna/forest/wetland mosaic beginning at least 3,500 y ago. Regional environmental variables did not drive the choices made by farmers and fishers, who shaped these local contexts to better manage resource extraction. The savannas we observe today were created in the post-European period, where their fire regime and structural diversity were shaped by cattle ranching.

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