Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes examines Indian agriculture in South America. The focus is on field types and field technologies, including agricultural landforms such as terraces, canals, and drained fields, which have persisted for hundreds of years. What emerges is a picture of mostly successful indigenous farming practices in difficult environments--rain forests, savannahs, swamps, rugged mountains, and deserts.

Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes examines Indian agriculture in South America. The focus is on field types and field technologies, including agricultural landforms such as terraces, canals, and drained fields, which have persisted for hundreds of years. What emerges is a picture of mostly successful indigenous farming practices in difficult environments--rain forests, savannahs, swamps, rugged mountains, and deserts.

Nowhere on Earth is there an ecological transformation so swift and so extreme as between the snow-line of the high Andes and the tropical rainforest of Amazonia. The different disciplines that research the human past in South America have long tended to treat these two great subzones of the continent as self-contained enough to be taken independently of each other. Objections have repeatedly been raised, however, to warn against imagining too sharp a divide between the people and societies of the Andes and Amazonia, when there are also clear indications of significant connections and transitions between them. Rethinking the Andes–Amazonia Divide brings together archaeologists, linguists, geneticists, anthropologists, ethnohistorians and historians to explore both correlations and contrasts in how the various disciplines see the relationship between the Andes and Amazonia, from deepest prehistory up to the European colonial period. The volume emerges from an innovative programme of conferences and symposia conceived explicitly to foster awareness, discussion and co-operation across the divides between disciplines. Underway since 2008, this programme has already yielded major publications on the Andean past, including History and Language in the Andes (2011) and Archaeology and Language in the Andes (2012).

This volume aims to present the essential work of geographer and historical ecologist William M. Denevan to explain the impact and influence his thinking had on the conceptual advancement not only in his own discipline, but in a range of related disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, and environmental history. The book is organized around eight themes, demonstrating Denevan’s early and profound insights on topics that remain of current relevance today, and the scholarly impact his writing had on subsequent scholarship. The book is unique because it offers commentary from active scholars who address the impacts of Prof. Denevan's thinking and work on contemporary environmental and ecological issues, with a focus on several groundbreaking themes (e.g. historical demography, agricultural landforms, cultural plant geography, human environmental impacts, indigenous agro-ecology, tropical agriculture, livestock and landscape, and synthetic contributions). This book will be of interest to a range of scholars in geography, anthropology, archaeology, history, and ecology, as well as to environmental managers and practitioners, especially those working for non-profit organizations and government organizations tasked with finding ways to adapt to global environmental change.

Geography in America at the Dawn of the 21st Century surveys American geographers' current research in their specialty areas and tracks trends and innovations in the many subfields of geography. As such, it is both a 'state of the discipline' assessment and a topical reference. It includes an introduction by the editors and 48 chapters, each on a specific specialty. The authors of each chapter were chosen by their specialty group of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). Based on a process of review and revision, the chapters in this volume have become truly representative of the recent scholarship of American geographers. While it focuses on work since 1990, it additionally includes related prior work and work by non-American geographers. Includes a foreword by the eminent geographer Gilbert White.

The Physical Geography of South America, the eighth volume in the Oxford Regional Environments series, presents an enduring statement on the physical and biogeographic conditions of this remarkable continent and their relationships to human activity. It fills a void in recent environmental literature by assembling a team of specialists from within and beyond South America in order to provide an integrated, cross-disciplinary body of knowledge about this mostly tropical continent, together with its high mountains and temperate southern cone. The authors systematically cover the main components of the South American environment - tectonism, climate, glaciation, natural landscape changes, rivers, vegetation, animals, and soils. The book then presents more specific treatments of regions with special attributes from the tropical forests of the Amazon basin to the Atacama Desert and Patagonian steppe, and from the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific coasts to the high Andes. Additionally, the continents environments are given a human face by evaluating the roles played by people over time, from pre-European and European colonial impacts to the effects of modern agriculture and urbanization, and from interactions with El Niño events to prognoses for the future environments of the continent.