This book by William Denevan on Amazonia and the Andes is one of a series of three volumes on the cultivated landscapes of the Americas; the others are on Middle America and North America. The authors of all three volumes are geographers and, to differing degrees, they belong to a common intellectual tradition that developed under Carl O. Sauer in the Department of Geography at Berkeley. The tradition focused on the landscape whose morphology was explained through an examination of the interactions of humans with their environments, either in the past or today, and for which evidence was obtained primarily through fieldwork. This approach is exemplified in Denevan’s book that focuses on the cultivated landscape in 1492, though it draws on evidence extending from prehistory to the present day. It does not discuss crops and their origins, another interest of the Berkeley School of Geography, but rather concentrates on the...

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