Indigenous South Americans Of The Past And Present

An Ecological Perspective

David J. Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813336091
• eBook ISBN: 9780429979484
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Utilizing ethnographic and archaeological data and an updated paradigm derived from the best features of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, this extensively illustrated book addresses over fifteen South American adaptive systems representing a broad cross section of band, village, chiefdom, and state societies throughout the continent over the past 13,000 years.Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present presents data on both prehistoric and recent indigenous groups across the entire continent within an explicit theoretical framework. Introductory chapters provide a brief overview of the variability that has characterized these groups over the long period of indigenous adaptation to the continent and examine the historical background of the ecological and cultural evolutionary paradigm. The book then presents a detailed overview of the principal environmental contexts within which indigenous adaptive systems have survived and evolved over thousands of years. It discusses the relationship between environmental types and subsistence productivity, on the one hand, and between these two variables and sociopolitical complexity, on the other. Subsequent chapters proceed in sequential order that is at once evolutionary (from the least to the most complex groups) and geographical (from the least to the most productive environments)?around the continent in counterclockwise fashion from the hunter-gatherers of Tierra del Fuego in the far south; to the villagers of the Amazonian lowlands; to the chiefdoms of the Amazon v¿ea and the far northern Andes; and, finally, to the chiefdoms and states of the Peruvian Andes. Along the way, detailed presentations and critiques are made of a number of theories based on the South American data that have worldwide implications for our understanding of prehistoric and recent adaptive systems.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

SOMETIME FIFTEEN TO twenty thousand years ago, the. first human settlers of the Americas crossed the land bridge between the Old and New Worlds and, through countless generations, eventually made their way south across the Isthmus of Panama to the continent of South America. As their ancestors to the north had done, the first inhabitants of the southern New World became expert collectors and hunters of the wild flora and fauna that flourished in astonishing diversity across the length and breadth of this vast area. Although the earliest date of their arrival in South America is still the subject of research and much debate, we now know with some certainty that by thirteen thousand years ago the Paleoindians, as they generally are called by anthropologists, had extended their occupation of the continent as far south as the Chilean site of Monte Verde, located some 5,500 kilometers south of the isthmus. By about eleven thousand years ago, they had reached the southernmost tip of the continent, judging from archaeological finds at sites such as Palli Aike and Fell's Cave in Chile.

In what in general human evolutionary terms was hut a brief flash of time—from thirteen thousand years ago to the beginning of the European conquest in A.D. 1532—the descendants of the Paleoindians adapted to every possible inhabitable environment throughout the continent—including the frigid straits and coniferous forests of the far south, the grassy pampas of modem-day Argentina, the rugged seasonally arid Brazilian uplands south of the Amazon River, the vast green sweep of the Amazon rain forest itself, and the awesome Andes mountain chain perched high over the western edge of the continent along its entire 7,700-kilometer length.

The types of human adaptive systems, or "levels of sociocultural integration," as anthropologist Julian H. Steward (1955:5) calls them, one would have encountered just prior to A.D. 1532 in this great diversity of environments included all of those found in other parts of the preindustrial world: migratory gatherer-hunter band groups still exploiting wild flora and fauna as had their Paleoindian ancestors; sedentary and semisedentary tribal villagers focused on small-scale agriculture, or horticulture; societies of incipient sociopolitical complexity, called chiefdoms, relying on relatively more intensive and productive agricultural systems; and, finally, societies at the maximum, or state, level of preindustrial complexity based on even more intensive food-producing systems involving irrigation agriculture.

South American Indigenous Groups

The mention here of just: a few of these groups by name (some sounding like so many poetic tongue twisters), as well as one or two features of their fame, makes clear not only that any attempt at comprehensive anthropological treatment of indigenous South Americans faces challenges, but also that at least some are known even to the beginning scholar focused on this continent (see Figure 1.1). At the level of hunter-gatherers there were (or are)

• the Yahgan (Yámana) canoe people and the Ona (Selk'nam) guanaco hunters of Tierra del Fuego, located at the southern tip of the continent, both groups adapted to one of the most challenging environments anywhere in the world;
• the Chono and Alacaluf (Halakwulup) canoe people of the towering forests and deep fjords of the rainy Chilean archipelago;
• the Puelche and Tehuelche of the dry, grassy southern pampas of Argentina, who used multiple leather thongs with attached pouches containing stones (more succinctly called bolas) to bring down the ñandú, or South American ostrich, of this area; and
• the Sirionó, who until very recently roamed the humid jungles of eastern lowland Bolivia practicing a mix of horticulture and hunting-gathering that permitted the continuance of their essentially mobile lifestyle.

All of these groups are now either totally extinct as populations or have lost most, or all, of their traditional lifeways as they were assimilated into nearby Latin American culture.

At the autonomous village level there are (or were)

• the Bororo of central Brazil, whose complex on-the-ground village layouts represent one of the most interesting and complicated South American social organizations;
• the Sherente of central Brazil, who, like many other South American groups from the Amazon area to the Andes, live in opposing but complementary societal halves called moieties;
• the Tupinambá of the eastern Amazon Basin, now extinct, but infamous in early colonial times as cannibals who cooked their human victims in large pots;
• the Kayapó of the southern Amazon Basin, a fiercely independent and, to intruding Brazilian settlers at least, warlike people whose cause recently was taken up by anthropologist Darrell Posey and rock star Sting;

FIGURE 1.1 Map of South America showing modern political boundaries and the location of selected indigenous groups past and present.

• the Mundurucú of the upper Tapajós River, in the southern part of the Amazon, known for their matrilocal marriage rule, the social solidarity of the women, and the long-distance raiding expeditions against unrelated groups carried out by the men, who, upon bringing human captives and trophy heads back to the settlements, returned in an exalted spiritual state that disallowed sexual relations for several years;
• the Yanomamö "fierce people" of northernmost Brazil and southeastern Venezuela, whose shamans, like many of those from Tierra del Fuego to the jungles of Venezuela, "throw" magical darts (called hekura, in Yanomamö) around their environment to cause any number of ills and, not surprisingly, the corresponding need for shamans in other villages to suck these darts out of the body in attempts to cure the intended victims; and
• the Shuar-Jívaro, of eastern Ecuador, who attacked nearby neighbors, including even their own kin, and until just recently shrank the heads of human victims killed on raiding expeditions to gain control over the soul power (called muisak) of the killed warriors.

Among the many groups at a village level of complexity outside the Amazon are

• the Kogi of the Sierra de Santa Marta, northern Colombia, a still unassimilated people who recently invited outsiders from BBC television in for a brief stay in their mountain fastness to deliver, as our "elder brothers," a message aimed at averting further ecological disasters in what they see as the dying "civilized" world of we "younger brothers";
• the Colorados, who live in rain forests on the western slopes, of the Ecuadorian Andes and are so named because of the men's custom of dyeing their hair with a red paste made from the achiote plant;
• the Aymara and the Quechua, who live in the hundreds of thousands across the high grasslands, or puna, and adjacent deep valleys of the Andean countries of Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, and who, although partly assimilated into national economies, still maintain egalitarian village adaptations that date back several thousand years; and
• the Mapuche of central Chile, who were famous in the early colonial period for their fierce resistance to the European encroachment and who still maintain many aspects of their traditional way of life.

Whereas some of the hand and village groups mentioned here have survived and many others are extinct, all of the indigenous Contact-period cultures at the levels of chiefdoms and states are now extinct, most of them having met with this fate either during the Conquest or within a century or so after the arrival of the Old World outsiders. This occurred not least because these cultures occupied some of the. most productive environments, to which, not surprisingly, the intruders were attracted for their own use. Nevertheless, we are speaking here of the extinction of these cultures as sociopolitical entities, or polities, and not as peoples, since in many cases at least some fraction of their populations survived the shock of intrusive cultures and diseases.

Among the best-known Contact-period societies at the chiefdom level were

• the Tapajós of the lower Amazon River, who were made famous by the accounts of Francisco de Orellana both for their great numbers and sociopolitical complexity and for the fact that their war leaders appeared to be women (hence the name Amazons, from Greek mythology, given to the river);
• the Omagua of the upper Amazon River, whose settlements, like those of their downstream neighbors, appear to have extended for "leagues" along the main river channel and were based on the high productivity of the nutrient-rich waters of the main channel of the river;
• the Tairona, whose prehispanic chiefdom-level societies are ancestral to the village-level Kogi (which, as will be seen in a later chapter, raises the. issue of societal devolution in the face of the European intrusion);
• the Muisca, or Chibcha, of the central Colombian plateau around the modern city of Bogotá, famous, like other Colombian indigenous groups, for their exquisite gold-and-copper alloy artifacts made by the "lost wax" technique;
• the San Agustín culture, southern Colombia, well known for its production of large, free-standing stone statues; and
• the Valdivia and Jama-Coaque complexes: of coastal Ecuador, famous for their elegant modeled pottery figures and vessels as well as for the possible signs (of interest to diffusionist scholars) of influences from various far-flung places, including Polynesia and west-central Mexico.

The ancient states of the Central Andes, beginning with the most recent at pre-1532 and going back to about A.D. 450, include

• the Inca, whose imperial organization and highway system extended along the Andean mountain chain from what is now central Chile to the southern extreme of modern Colombia, a larger area by far than that occupied by any other polity in prehispanic South America;
• the Chimú of the Peruvian north coast, famous for their huge mud city of Chan Chán, one of the largest of such centers anywhere in the world;
• the Lupaqa and Pacaxes kingdoms of the Bolivian and Peruvian altiplano, or "high plain," around Lake Titicaca, famous among modern-day travelers to the area for their beautifully constructed stone burial towers, called chullpas here and elsewhere in the Andes;
• the Wari of the central Peruvian highlands, the probable creators of the first extensive state, or empire, in this part of South America and whose ancient capital lies near the modern city of Ayacucho;
• the Tiwanaku of the Lake Titicaca region, known both for their giant carved stone Statues with "weeping" eyes and for the highly productive ridged fields they constructed along the shore of the lake;
• the Nazca of the Peruvian south coast, known by almost anyone who has read about South America as the creators of an extensive (and still mysterious) series of lines and drawings etched out on nearby desert plains, or pampas; and
• the Moche of the Peruvian north coast, well known for one of the most elegant pottery styles ever produced in South America and, more recently, made famous around the world by the archaeological rescue from the hands of would-be tomb robbers of fabulous royal graves containing gold and silver artifacts and hundreds of other luxury goods.

Scope of This Book

Nearly fifty years ago, fresh from the editorship of the seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians, Julian Steward joined with a coauthor, Louis Faron, to write a book entitled Native Peoples of South America, with the goal of providing a much-needed overview of the disparate sets of anthropological data included in the volumes. Considering the potential interest of indigenous South American cultures of the past and present to anthropologists and other students of human adaptation and evolution, it may seem surprising that the volumes of the Handbook, published between 1946 and 1950 by the Bureau of American Ethnology, represented the first attempt ever to synthesize scientifically everything then known about the great diversity ot indigenous groups that had been for so many thousands of years established on the southern continent of the New World.

As stated by Steward and Faron in the preface to their 1959 book, "scores of explorers, Spanish administrators, missionaries, and historians," not to mention a few early ethnographers, had described the cultures and achievements of indigenous South Americans, often at some length, but no one had ever before attempted a synthesis aimed at bringing together the ethnographic and archaeological data. Moreover, Steward went one important step further than the multiauthor seven-volume work could go—namely, he examined these data in light of the theoretical context of his (then-new) cultural ecological perspective on human adaptive systems, which, among other things, attempted to point out the intimate relationship that occurs between human cultures at all levels of sociopolitical integration and their subsistence environments.

In light of the tremendous increase in our knowledge of past and present indigenous South Americans in the years since Steward and Faron's pathbreaking book was published, as well as advances in the sophistication of ecologically based theories about human adaptive systems, it is surprising that no book aimed at synthesizing the ethnographic and archaeological data on a continentwide level within a singular, coherent theoretical framework has been published since then. Meggers's (1992b) Prehistoric America, which makes reference to ethnographic data, is an exception at the much broader hemispherical level, but for South America in particular in the years since Steward and Faron's book appeared, archaeologists have written and edited books on prehistoric topics (e.g., Gordon Willey's [1971] An Introduction to American Archaeobgy: South America and Jesse Jennings's [1978] Ancient South Americans) while ethnologists have written and edited books on recent or contemporaneous topics (e.g., Patricia Lyon's [1974] Native South Americans and Daniel Gross's [1973] Peoples and Cultures of Native South America).

In fairness to South Americanist scholars, however, this lack surely is due in large part to the very volume of the data and the increasing challenge to any single individual since Steward to bring them adequately together. Thus, at a point now over forty years later, any attempt at a meaningful synthesis must of necessity limit itself to exemplary case studies of a broad cross-section of the groups and environments mentioned earlier in this Introduction, since with all the data now available it would be quite impossible to equal Steward and Faron's feat at anything other than encyclopedic length.

Rationale: Ethnology and Archaeology

In spite of this constraint, the underlying rationale of this book is that there is a need for an updated, continentwide treatment of indigenous South American cultures that includes consistent reference to the sociocultural and archaeological information we now have at hand for the groups that have inhabited the different geographic areas of the continent. Following the theoretical lead of Steward and several other anthropological scholars, I argue that data from both recent and ancient adaptations in each major area provide the strongest, if not the only reasonable, basis for understanding continuity and change in that area. In a very real sense, then, this book takes the not unreasonable view that we can permit ourselves to be as interested in the recent as we are in the ancient.

But readers familiar with the science of prehistory will know that, even though it is possible for archaeologists to determine with some accuracy the material features of ancient cultural systems—such as the artifacts, subsistence (food) items, dwellings, monuments, and sites—it is not particularly easy to dig up or detect the nonmaterial features, such as social organization and ideology. Nevertheless, while ethnologists are very good at determining all of the features of the traditional adaptive systems they study, including kinship and beliefs, it is often very difficult or impossible for them to know the time depth of features of the material culture without reference to archaeological data. The point, succinctly put, is that each of these two subfields of anthropology—ethnology and archaeology—has its strengths as well as its limitations. Each therefore needs the data and perspectives gained by the other, at least if the anthropologist is interested in achieving the most complete perspective possible on continuity and change over long time periods and hence in contributing to the development of overarching anthropological knowledge and theory.

Moreover, given the evidence of continuity in some adaptations over time, the data we have on the recent groups in a particular geographic area of the continent (e.g., origin myths, gender relations, group size, subsistence practices, settlement patterns, and intergroup conflict for the Ona-Selk'nam and the Yahgan-Yámana of Tierra del Fuego) may well enhance our understanding of their ancestors in reference to the much more limited material data available to us from the dim past (e.g., the faunal remain...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Approach
• 3 An Overview of South American Environments
• 4 Subsistence and Sociocultural Development
• 5 Band Societies Present and Past
• 6 Amazonian Villages and Chiefdoms
• 7 Northwest Villages and Chiefdoms
• 8 Contemporary Central Andean Villages
• 9 Prehistoric Central Andean States
• 10 Toward a Scientific Paradigm in South Americanist Studies
• Glossary
• References
• Index