Plants and Peopling: Questions and Provocations about Management and Domestication in Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Brazil and Amazonia

We question prevailing models of the settlement of the Americas based on notions of adaptation to resource scarcity in the environment. Archaeobotanical data from twenty sites from the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene from Brazil and Amazonia demonstrate the ample and persistent use of a large variety of plants that have been domesticated and/or are hiperdominant species today. Using concepts from Niche Construction Theory, we seek to recapture the role of human agency through evidence of the management and domestication of plants and places.