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- A port by any other name: a preliminary spatial analysis of ancient infrastructural landscapes and settlement organization at Macurany, BrazilPublication . Ellis, Grace; Browne Ribeiro, Anna T.; Carvalho, Michel; Fisher, Christopher T.Complex human-environmental processes form identifiable, lasting features on the landscape that can illuminate past human behavior and human-environment interactions. We examine the anthropogenic landscape of the ancient port of Macurany, located along the middle Amazon River in Parintins, Brazil, and identify four classes of anthropogenic landscape features at the site: wharfs, middens, terra preta (dark or black earths), and cultural forests. Middens, terra preta, and cultural forests have been found at archaeological sites in regions surrounding Macurany, but wharfs have not previously been reported in Amazonian contexts predating European contact. Taken together, these features are clearly the result of anthropogenesis and represent a range of subsistence, settlement, and infrastructure-building activities pointing to an ancient society that was actively engaged in modifying the surrounding landscape for purposes beyond settlement and subsistence. Evidence for a permanent, extensive, continuously settled society practicing intensive landscape engineering in this region of Amazonia reinforces findings of dense habitation, infrastructure, and early urbanization in Amazonia prior to European contact. This research helps expand our understanding of human-environment interactions, landscape formation processes, and settlement organization in ancient Amazonia.
- Infrastructure beyond cities: perspectives from the AmericasPublication . Henry, Edward R.; Ellis, Grace; DeSanto, Carly M.The study of infrastructure is becoming a common focus in research across the social sciences. In this endeavor, archaeologists are uniquely situated to assess how societies in the past created, and relied on, infrastructure over time, and the different ways it facilitated or impeded communication, movement, and social interaction through an understanding of the material record. However, most archaeological engagements with the study of infrastructure occur through case studies that closely mirror the modern contexts in which contemporary social scientists study infrastructure: within state-organized sociopolitical contexts or urban places. We use this article as an opportunity to review the literature on infrastructure, contextualize how it has been adopted in archaeology, and then advocate for expanding the study of infrastructure to non-urban small-scale societies. In doing so, we reassociate the notion of infrastructure with connective and cooperative human projects that unfold within and between places situated across social landscapes. This perspective requires one to divorce infrastructure from modernity and early urban projects and to recenter it within the material nature of human interaction. It is our goal to offer themes and perspectives drawn from contemporary notions of infrastructure to better understand the diverse forms and functions of built and natural environments apart from early urban places in the ancient Americas.