The Way to the Water Is a Wharf: Evidence of Intensive Human Interaction and Interconnective Infrastructure in Ancient Amazonia from the Port of Macurany, Brazil
M. Grace Ellis, PhD Candidate, Colorado State University
In recent decades, archaeologists have documented large-scale pre-Columbian construction projects spanning entire regions of Amazonia, including extensive interfluvial road networks along the southern rim of the Amazon Basin and wharfs and canal systems along the lowland Amazon River floodplains. This evidence defies traditional notions of ancient Amazonians as socially fragmented and ephemeral. Instead, the presence of such large-scale, planned, permanent, infrastructural features indexes increasing intensive human habitation and interaction at local and regional scales just prior to European contact, and likely increased economic activities as well. New archaeological evidence from the port of Macurany, located along the Middle Amazon River, corroborates recent claims, revealing that pre-Columbian inhabitants in this region of Amazonia engineered numerous wharfs as part of a large-scale, fluvial-terrestrial infrastructure project that helped facilitate regional interconnectivity and exchange, likely of Brazil nuts among other goods, with larger regional polities centered on the Central and Lower Amazon River. This research highlights an emerging facet of Amazonian archaeology that explicitly recognizes the important and active role of regional interaction and economic exchange among ancient Amazonian communities, and the crucial role these activities played in the development of material infrastructural networks that lasted for centuries and helped perpetuate regional polities and build nascent urban centers. Ultimately, the port of Macurany represents an understudied region that sheds light on early forms of urbanism and intensive landscape engineering in tropical contexts, and networks of exchange and the nature of economies in ancient Amazonia.
M. Grace Ellis is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology and Geography at Colorado State University and Associate Student at the Interdisciplinary Center for Archaeological Research and Evolution of Human Behavior at the University of Algarve. She specializes in landscape archaeology and remote sensing approaches to explore past human-environment interactions in various geographic contexts. In Amazonia, her research focuses on land use intensification, infrastructure, and social interaction among pre-Columbian floodplain communities. Her dissertation research focuses on modelling how the pre-Columbian maritime network developed and changed across the Caribbean Sea from AD 0 – AD 1500 to understand the impact of local and regional exchange on polities across the study area and the macroregional maritime system as a whole.
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