Kayapó savanna management: Fire, soils, and forest islands in a threatened biome

Abstract

A great deal of Amazonian research has been devoted to the study of indigenous management of tropical forest resources. Questions of soils research have become particularly significant for understanding the forms of landscape manipulations that could have given rise to large pre-Columbian populations in tropical forest areas, and their implications for sustainable practices today, especially in light of deter-minist theories that viewed the possibilities of Amazonian cultural evolution as constrained by the general poverty of its upland soils (Denevan 2001; Erickson 2000; Heckenberger et al. 2003; Kim et al. 2007; Lehmann 2003; Peterson et al. 2001). The analyses of indigenous tropical savanna management, and especially of soils on the other hand, are relatively rare. In part this reflects the reality that savanna peoples are also often managers of forests, since savanna ecosystems are usually part of ecotones that include gallery forests and a complex mosaic of lower biomass, semi-deciduous forests and successional systems as well as the open woodlands. Researchers often laid the emphasis on the forest rather than the Cerrado side of the equation, because they themselves were often more interested in the agricultural bases of these societies (Gross, Hames). For funding, it was often convenient to portray such heterodox groups as forest dwellers, or ambiguously as native Amazonians since such an approach fit in with broader social and scientific concerns about tropical environments and human rights alarms over Amazonian development. © Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009.