7. The Historical Ecology of a Complex Landscape in Bolivia

Abstract

IDEAL STUDIES OF the interface between people and the environment involve collaboration among scholars from diverse backgrounds to understand how complex landscapes came to be over periods of hundreds, if not thousands, of years.Historical ecological research displays such interdisciplinary underpinnings because it is situated at the interface and overlap of the social sciences, natural sciences, and humanities in the programmatic study of how the typically complex interactions of nature and culture have become historical and cultural landscapes.Such diversity is in evidence with regard to the scholars who have contributed to this volume, from archaeology, ethnography, ethnobotany, genetics, geography, biology, and ecology.The historical ecology applied in this chapter underscores how to read physical signatures and material patterning, including similarity, disjuncture, and anomaly, embedded in a cultural landscape in the Bolivian Amazon.On heterogeneous landscapes of considerable age, these signatures may form a complex palimpsest, a vertical or horizontal layering or stratigraphy of signatures and patterning etched on the surface of the earth, deep into the soil (Erickson, chapter 8, this volume; or, as in the case of Amazonian Dark Earth, Glaser and Woods 2004; Lehmann et al. 2003), or above the surface fixed in the layers of vegetation extending up through the emergent canopy (Balee 1989(Balee , 1994;; Campbell et al., chapter I, this volume).The multiple scales of study range from microorganisms and soil chemistry (in the case of Amazonian Dark Earth), stratigraphic profiles of anthropogenic soil horizons, to rearrangements of local hydrology, drainage, and water tables to the structure and physiognomy of the living forest and landscape more generally-that is, to the terrestrial and aquatic plants and animals living below, on, and above the earth's surface (chapters 2, 4, and 6, this volume).

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