HISTORICAL ECOLOGY REPRESENTS a new perspective on understanding the complex historical relationship between human beings and the biosphere of earth. Contributors to this volume explore detailed interactions between local peoples and their associated landscapes through time in various regions within the New World Tropics (Neotropics). The twelve substantive chapters represent wide geographic coverage, including chapters on Mesoamerica, the western forested flank of the Ecuadorian Andes, the desert coast of Peru, northern South America east of the Andes, and the Amazon basin, with the temporal frame of reference ranging from early prehistory at the beginning of the Holocene period to the present time and future prospects. The authors cover such topics as modifications of genetics of plant and animal species, including domesticates, semidomesticates, and wild species; the geographical distribution and availability of domesticates; biodiversity and its origins in local and regional contexts; agrodiversity; origins of linguistic terms, narratives, oral histories, and memories relating to the environment; fire histories; material culture and its origins and development through time; the definition of archaeological sites, settlement patterns, and cultural landscapes; the development and expansion of prehistoric, complex polities; the origins and development of anthropogenic soils; documentation of pre-Columbian landscape engineering; archaeological and agronomic experimentation in prehistory; and relations between humans and domesticated as well as not-so-domesticated plants and animals through time.

The product of the collision between nature and culture, wherever it has occurred, is a landscape. These chapters view historical ecology as an interdisciplinary research program that takes the landscape to be the central unit of analysis and human beings as the principal mechanism for change in the