This symposium of five papers presented at the 1959 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in Mexico City reflects the concern of contemporary anthropology with the concept “that the fundamental locus of change from one culture type to another is found in the ecological structure which involves the technology in relation . . . to habitat” and social conditions. The problems dealt with are (1) under what conditions and processes (external and internal) did some societies in South America advance to higher levels, and (2) under what conditions (especially habitat conditions) was growth arrested or minimized?
The papers are arranged in a “genetic” agricultural sequence: Incipient and Intermediate Tropical Forest Horticulture, Circum-Caribbean, Sub-Andean, and Andean. Of particular interest are the controversial discussions of the possible limitations on agriculture and, consequently, cultural level by the tropical forest habitat. In the first paper Anthony Leeds concludes that “special ecological conditions” (limited cultivable land) prevents the Yaruro of the Venezuelan llanos from evolving advanced stages of horticulture. (However, more advanced levels have been achieved in comparable savanna regions, notably by the Mojos of northeastern Bolivia). In Robert Carneiro’s study of the Kuikuru of central Brazil it is effectively argued that the necessity for a shifting type of cultivation does not establish an upper cultural limit. Carneiro suggests that intensive systems of agriculture have arisen in response to population pressure “where the area of cultivable land was distinctly circumscribed,” as in narrow valleys but not in unbroken Amazonia. This theory of cultural development seems worthy of further consideration. In the remaining papers William Sturtevant describes sixteenth-century Taino agriculture in Hispaniola; Gerardo Reichel-Dolomatoff discusses “The agricultural basis of the Sub-Andean chiefdoms of Columbia”; and Donald Collier outlines the sequence of agricultural types on the Peruvian coast.
The carefully researched papers of this symposium make important theoretical and empirical contributions towards an understanding of cultural change in South America. Significantly, most of the authors recognize that similar habitats do not necessarily evoke similar subsistence patterns and cultural levels; however, there is disagreement on whether a culture may reach an evolutionary “dead end” in certain environments.
