South American Contributions to World Archaeology

BONOMO MARIANO; ARCHILA, SONIA

Springer-Nature

Lugar: Cham; Año: 2021 p. 461

978-3-030-74000-9

Particularities of South American archaeological record have constantly challenged global proposals and explanations about humankind past. We would like to illustrate in this book, how particular cases of South American archaeology have contributed to the understanding of a global and basic issue: human relations with their environments and landscapes during the past. We have been learning that models proposed for other parts of the world to explain, for example, human occupation of territories, use and management of biota and mineral resources, domestication of plants and animals, should not be uncritically projected into South American past. Undoubtedly, this apprenticeship has also been inspired on the numerous contemporary indigenous people, whose daily activities and cosmologies changed and expanded our interpretative horizon concerning complexity of the relationship between nature and culture. We join in this book papers that connect local/regional study cases with global issues and discuss topics such as: regional trajectories of societies that create different cultural landscapes in South America, subsistence practices and social strategies for the use and management of different resources (including plants, animals and minerals), material culture and its relation to the representation of natural world (e.g. rock art, pottery, stone, bone, ivory and shell artefacts, metal objects, and so on).