Introduction: South American Archaeology’s Contributions to World Archaeology

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South American Contributions to World Archaeology

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Abstract

Particularities of South American archaeological record have constantly challenged global proposals and explanations about humankind past. In this book we illustrate how particular cases of South American archaeology have contributed to the understanding of a global and basic issue: human relations with their environments and landscapes during the past. We have learnt that models proposed for other parts of the world to explain, for example, human occupation of territories, use and management of biota and mineral resources, domestication of plants and animals, should not be uncritically projected into South American past. Undoubtedly, this apprenticeship has also been inspired on the numerous contemporary indigenous people, whose daily activities and cosmologies changed and expanded our interpretative horizon concerning complexity of the relationship between nature and culture. We present in this book papers that connect local/regional study cases with global issues and discuss topics such as: regional trajectories of societies that create different cultural landscapes in South America, subsistence practices and social strategies for the use and management of different resources (including plants, animals and minerals), and material culture and its relation to the representation of natural world.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all the chapter authors who participated in the book, and the OWA series editors, Inés Domingo Sanz and Naoko Matsumoto, who encouraged us to propose and develop this project. We also thank the Springer Nature coordinators, Gideon Philip, Sowmya Thodur, Christi Lue, and Teresa Krauss, who helped us with editing of the volume. Rocío Bidegain and María del Pilar Ríos also helped us with the editing of the chapters. We would also like to thank the reviewers, Pablo Ambrústulo, Diego Andreoni, Bernardo Arriaza, Manuel Arroyo-Kalin, Ramiro Barberena, Cristiana Barreto, Cristina Bellelli, Nuno Bicho, Tamara Bray, María Bruno, Andrea Cuéllar, Florencio Delgado, Violeta Di Prado, Neil Duncan, Mariana Fabra, Nora Flegenheimer, María Gutierrez, João Carlos Ferreira de Melo, Carla Jaimes Betancourt, Andrés Laguens, Gustavo Martínez, Rafael Milheira, María Gabriela Musaubach, Laura Miotti, Gustavo Neme, Axel Nielsen, Heiko Prümers, María Cristina Scattolin, Charles Stanish, Francisco Zangrando and James Zeidler, for their useful suggestions and comments.

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Archila, S., Bonomo, M., Hastorf, C.A. (2021). Introduction: South American Archaeology’s Contributions to World Archaeology. In: Bonomo, M., Archila, S. (eds) South American Contributions to World Archaeology. One World Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73998-0_1

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