Evidence of an association of plant cultivation and cultural forests on black Indian soil is found in the botanical identifications of the carbonized plants recovered from the soils. For example, in both

the urban Santarem site and the Santarem-phase site at Caverna da Pedra Pintada, the crop maize, cucurbits, and the important palms Pupunha, B. gasipaes and Acai, E. oleracea, were identified ( Roosevelt, 2000:472–473), as well as fruits from cultural forest species: forest nance, Selleckchem Veliparib B. crispa, hog plum, Spondias mombin, cashew, Anacardium giganteum, Anacardium occidentale, Poupartia amazonica (Anacardiaceae), passionflower, Passiflora nitida, Norantea guianensis (Marcgraviaceae), Endopleura uchi (Humiriaceae), Silvia itauba (Lauraceae), Casimirella rupestris (Icacinaceae), Moutabea chodatiana (Polygalaceae), the palms

Acrocomia aculeata, E. oleracea, Mauritia excelsa (Fig. 14), Mauritiella armata, and Syagrus cocoides, etc. Even the small black soil site at Maicura in the Colombian interfluves had remains of maize, manioc, papaya, Acai and many other palm fruits ( Morcote-Rios, 2008). In their large, permanent settlements, late prehistoric humans created in Amazonia a regionally prominent type of bio-cultural deposit anthropic soil. For both past and current human economies, these black soils have been one of the most important Epacadostat chemical structure resources in the Amazon. The urban-scale populations of prehistoric cultural centers such as Santarem relied on the soils’ products for hundreds of years. The extensive dark soils near transportation hubs are still an agricultural resource and feed Amazonian cities with their products. They provide the substrate for subsistence farming, urban-supply truck gardening, and cash cropping for export. The small, isolated ones are sought-after resources for rural dispersed

settlements. Thus, certain ancient human activities created a resource for sustainable production. The venerable creations, however, are vulnerable Gefitinib clinical trial to destruction and in many places have been removed or covered up. Often associated with Amazonian archeological dark soils and other types of prehistoric cultural deposits are the distinctive anthropic forests called cultural or oligarchic forests (Balee, 1989, Balee, 1994, Balee, 2013, Balee and Campbell, 1990, Balick, 1984, Clement, 1999, Goulding and Smith, 2007, Henderson, 1995, Peters et al., 1989, Politis, 2007, Roosevelt, 2010a and Smith et al., 2007) An alternative term, hyperdominant, see Steege et al., 2013, exaggerates the degree of dominance of individual species and was coined after the terms cultural and oligarchic, which thus take preference. The cultural forests occur at most current ethnographic settlements, fields, and their surroundings and at most known archeological sites. But the existence of archaeological sites (e.g., Evans and Meggers, 1968 and Smith, 1980) in oligarchic forest areas is not always acknowledged (e.g., Macia and Svenning, 2005).