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Towards an Environmental History of the Amazon: From Prehistory to the Nineteenth Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

David Cleary
David Cleary*
Affiliation:
The Nature Conservancy
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Abstract

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This article reviews the environmental history of the Amazon basin from early prehistory to the 1850s, concluding at the start of the rubber boom. It argues that the Amazon's past can be understood in terms of a transition from wilderness to landscape, in a broadly similar way to the environmental history of Europe and North America. A detailed overview of the archaeological record suggests that both floodplain and upland environments were heavily influenced by human intervention during prehistory. The colonial and early republican periods also saw dramatic environmental changes. Interpretations of the Amazon that stress environmental constraints on human agency or portray it as largely virginal or unsettled prior to the modern period are at best an oversimplification.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , 2001 , pp. 65 - 96
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

The author would like to thank Bill Woods for the map and help with the archaeology, three anonymous LARR reviewers for their help in refining the text, and John Womack and the Department of History at Harvard for providing the new institutional context that gave birth to it. Views expressed are personal and unrelated to The Nature Conservancy.

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