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HISTORICAL ECOLOGY IS a powerful perspective for understanding the complex
historical relationship between human beings and the biosphere. The present
volume proceeds from the axiom that humanity in its historic paths across
earth has interceded in material and measurable ways in a biotic world that
evolved previously by natural selection and other evolutionary forces, and that
the changes thus imposed on nature have in turn been reflected in human
cultures, societies, and languages through time. In effect, historical ecology
encompasses the view that wherever humans have trodden, the natural
environment is somehow different, sometimes in barely perceptible ways, sometimes
in dramatic ways. The authors in this volume have been trained in various disciplines,
including anthropology (especially the subdisciplines of archaeology
and sociocultural anthropology), geography, plant genetics, integrative biology,
and general ecology, and they recognize the interdependence of these fields in
attempting to comprehend the effects and countereffects of human behavior in
the lowlands of the New World Tropics (Neotropics). The Neotropics are the
torrid zone of the New World, and the lowlands within them are tropical in
climate, moist, usually heavily forested, and at altitudes below approximately
500 meters. As shown in this volume’s case studies, the neotropical lowlands
exhibit classic anthropogenic or cultural landscapes formed over thousands of
years.
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