The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

324 Anna C. Roosevelt
enough to be considered staple foods, but they may represent anthropomorphic
site vegetation used for food supplements and/or materials.
Stable isotope analyses carried out on several human and animal bones
from Barrancoid levels of sites in the Peruvian Amazon and from the
Formative component at Caverna da Pedra Pintada showed intermediate
stable carbon isotope ratios and high nitrogen isotope ratios consonant
with mixed diets of horticulture and foraging. The stable isotope analysis
of the collagen in human bones from early Corozal levels at the end of
the Formative occupation in the middle Orinoco are consistent with,
though not limited to, a diet of manioc, fish, and game. They do not fit
the pattern expected of maize eaters, which appears only later at the site.
In many ways, the early horticultural village phase of prehistoric
occupation resembles the present-day Amazonian Indian occupation.
Parallels are the importance of root over seed cropping, the reliance on
fauna for protein, emphasis on animals in art styles, and settlement in
dispersed villages. But there is a major discontinuity between the early
prehistoric and recent ethnographic versions of this lifeway. The lifeway
of tribal villages disappeared from several areas between 1,000 and 2,000
years ago at the time of the establishment of intensive seed-cropping,
human population growth, and the development of complex cultures.
Thus die culture of the present-day Indians of Amazonia may be an
ancient way of life that has come back into importance since the dislocations
and population losses incurred during the European conquest.
Perhaps the history of this way of life in Amazonia is a clue to the
conditions that made it viable: low population density and a comparative
lack of competition over land and resources. As an adaptive complex, the
goal of this subsistence system seems to have been to produce a calorie
source so that the scarce faunal resources could be husbanded for protein
needs. Its disappearance from the floodplains during the period of population
expansion in late prehistoric times may be related to the inability
of this horticultural complex to exploit floodplain nutrients for the production
of protein at a lower trophic level, through plants. For that, the
complex had to shift emphasis from starchy root crops to seed crops.
Because the intensive cultivation of annuals is a labor-intensive procedure,
it is not surprising that subsistence shifted rapidly back to slashand-burn
root cultivation after conquest.
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