AI Article Synopsis
- Historical ecologists found that past human activities have lasting effects on wild landscapes across various regions, including the Amazon.
- Current homegardens in Central Amazonia exhibit a blend of useful plants that reflect influences from pre-Columbian occupations, with more complex archaeological contexts leading to higher plant diversity.
- The composition of native species in these gardens reveals significant differences tied to historical land use, highlighting how ancient agricultural practices continue to shape modern ecosystems.
Article Abstract
Historical ecologists have demonstrated legacy effects in apparently wild landscapes in Europe, North America, Mesoamerica, Amazonia, Africa and Oceania. People live and farm in archaeological sites today in many parts of the world, but nobody has looked for the legacies of past human occupations in the most dynamic areas in these sites: homegardens. Here we show that the useful flora of modern homegardens is partially a legacy of pre-Columbian occupations in Central Amazonia: the more complex the archaeological context, the more variable the floristic composition of useful native plants in homegardens cultivated there today. Species diversity was 10% higher in homegardens situated in multi-occupational archaeological contexts compared with homegardens situated in single-occupational ones. Species heterogeneity (β-diversity) among archaeological contexts was similar for the whole set of species, but markedly different when only native Amazonian species were included, suggesting the influence of pre-conquest indigenous occupations on current homegarden species composition. Our findings show that the legacy of pre-Columbian occupations is visible in the most dynamic of all agroecosystems, adding another dimension to the human footprint in the Amazonian landscape.
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|---|---|
| http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4451503 | PMC |
| http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127067 | PLOS |
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