Continuous human presence without extensive reductions in forest cover over the past 2500 years in an aseasonal Amazonian rainforest
Date
04/05/2018Author
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Abstract
The impact of pre-Columbian indigenous communities on forest cover in Amazonia is highly contentious, particularly for the wettest forests. To contribute to this debate, we studied the vegetation and fire history of a site, Quistococha, which lies within the aseasonal forests of the northern Peruvian Amazon and is associated with independently dated pre-Columbian and recent human occupation. Paired cores from swamp and lake environments were used to distinguish landscape-scale changes in vegetation from local-scale succession. An increased abundance of disturbance-adapted taxa in the pollen record from the lake, but not swamp, since c. AD 1860 likely reflects extensive deforestation related to the expansion of the nearby city of Iquitos. However, previous persistent occupation of the site by pre-Columbian indigenous communities, indicated by the charcoal record from the lake site, is not associated with evidence for similarly extensive disturbance of the landscape. The unique features of this site therefore demonstrate that occupation by indigenous communities over thousands of years was not associated with large-scale deforestation. These results support an emerging model of persistent but localised impacts by pre-Columbian indigenous communities on aseasonal Amazonian forests.
Citation
Kelly , T J , Lawson , I T , Roucoux , K H , Baker , T R , Honorio-Coronado , E N , Jones , T D & Rivas Panduro , S 2018 , ' Continuous human presence without extensive reductions in forest cover over the past 2500 years in an aseasonal Amazonian rainforest ' , Journal of Quaternary Science , vol. 33 , no. 4 , pp. 369-379 . https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3019
Publication
Journal of Quaternary Science
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0267-8179Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created, accepted version manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1002/jqs.3019
Description
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Royal Geographical Society, and NERC (grant ref. NE/H011773/1 and a quota PhD studentship), including two radiocarbon allocations (refs 1612.0312, 1558.0411).Collections
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