"Open the floodgates of heaven": Amazonian climate change in Pre-Columbian times

Abstract

The history of climatic variations in Amazonia and their consequences on the pre-Columbian world has long been ignored for lack of solid data. The rise of interdisciplinary research in recent decades, which connects archaeology, paleoecology, and palaeoclimatology, now allows us to better evaluate the links between climate variability and ancient cultural development. The arrival of the first humans at the end of the Pleistocene coincided with climatic warming in Amazonia that may have had a partial impact on the disappearance of the megafauna. Subsequently, climatic fluctuations during the Holocene sometimes had crucial repercussions on regional demography and human movements. For example, the drier period accompanying the Medieval Climatic Anomaly (950–700 BP) most likely had direct consequences on human settlement. While some Amazonian cultures flourished, others reorganized, often moving to other nearby locations within the region. In this chapter, we provide an overview of how climate reconstruction data can help us understand archaeological and cultural data throughout Amazonia. Taking care to understand the nuance and complexity of societies through time, climatic–environmental conditions are presented as one of many factors driving human social organization, settlement patterns, and land-use change observed in the archaeological record.