Cultural Forests of the Amazon

“Here Balée emphasizes what he calls primary and secondary landscape transformations as terms that should replace primary and secondary succession in the scientific community. The new terms explicitly and implicitly include human agency, which is often not recognized or is willfully ignored by numerous disciplines that deal with Amazonian peoples, landscapes, and ecosystems. The terms are clearly supported by the previous ten chapters in this volume and are the essence of the historical ecology school of thought. Since this human agency is recognized in all other biomes where humans have lived and transformed landscapes since we became modern, it is high time to accept this view in Amazonia as well. This new book convincingly shows the way.”
—Economic Botany
 

"Cultural Forests of the Amazon is a masterful and moving book on Amazonian historical ecology. At once an intellectual biography, a tropical adventure story, and a rigorous analysis, Balée's engaging book makes a revolutionary case about Amazonian woodlands and a hopeful argument about humans and nature in the New World tropics."—Susanna B. Hecht, coauthor of The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon

“Drawing on more than twenty-five years at the cutting edge of Amazonian anthropology, William Balée offers a series of key texts on the nature of neotropical cultural rainforests that outlines the development of a field that has fundamentally changed the way we think about ourselves as a species, away from reductionist adaptationism. A must read for anyone interested in anthropology and environment.”
—Christian Isendahl, author of Common Knowledge: Lowland Maya Urban Farming at Xuch and coeditor of The Urban Mind: Cultural and Environmental Dynamics