Event Date and Time
-
Location
Zoom
 
The Center for Research and Collaboration in the Indigenous Americas (CRACIA) is a new center associated with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Maryland (see www.cracia.org).
 
Please join us next Friday, April 16th at 3:00 PM ET (20:00 GMT) for Eduardo Neves' presentation entitled "Four Decades of Amazonian Archaeology." Eduardo's presentation is part of CRACIA's Spring 2021 theme, "Four Decades of Lowland South American Anthropology." 
 
Four Decades of Amazonian Archaeology
Eduardo Neves, Universidade de São Paulo
 
Amazonian archaeology has gone through remarkable changes in the last 40 years. If by 1980, it was a polarized field with few practitioners, most of them based in the US, today it is a vibrant area with many research centers in South America and abroad.
 
These changes are the outcome of distinct factors. First, the theoretical contribution of Historical Ecology provides a template that conceptually unifies the field today. Second, in the case of Brazil, the massive expansion of public education programs enabled the development of archaeology programs in several Amazonian universities. Third, and related to the second, the implementation of affirmative action programs that provide local Amazonian students - including Indigenous people, but also quilombolas and caboclos - access to undergraduate and graduate education in Archaeology. Fourth, the expansion of CRM activities related to large infrastructure projects, some of them with catastrophic consequences.
 
The consequence of these changes has been a remarkable increase in the data available for previously unknown areas in the Amazon. Such new information allows for a critique of the environmental deterministic and evolutionist paradigms that were influential in the discipline during the twentieth century and also provide the basis for formulating different theoretical perspectives.