Search

The earliest pottery yet found in the Western Hemisphere has been excavated from a prehistoric shell midden near Santarem in the lower Amazon, Brazil. Calibrated accelerator radiocarbon dates on charcoal, shell, and pottery and a thermoluminescence date on pottery from the site fall from about 8000 to 7000 years before the present. The early fishing village is part of a long prehistoric trajectory that contradicts theories that resource poverty limited cultural evolution in the tropics., AMAZONIA HAS BEEN DESCRIBED AS sparsely occupied by small Indian groups in prehistoric times. The resource poverty of the tropical forest habitat was thought to have precluded permanent settlement, population [...]

We welcome Blockley et al.'s paper that raises the issue of calibration in the Late Glacial, although for reasons given below we believe their conclusions are premature. We are also [...]