Review: among the new books: Cultivated landscapes of native Amazonia and the Andes. (Americas).

Review: among the new books: Cultivated landscapes of native Amazonia and the Andes. (Americas). WILLIAM M. DENEVAN. Cultivated landscapes of native Amazonia andthe Andes. xxx+396 pages, 83 figures, 5 tables. 2001. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press; 0-19-823407-4 hardback 70 [pounds sterling]. Prof. DENEVAN has produced a major comparative archaeological,historical and ethnographic eth��nog��ra��phy?n.The branch of anthropology that deals with the scientific description of specific human cultures.eth��nog review of traditional farming, the synthesisof many years of research. He has long been `convinced that ... fieldsin South America South America,fourth largest continent (1991 est. pop. 299,150,000), c.6,880,000 sq mi (17,819,000 sq km), the southern of the two continents of the Western Hemisphere. once supported very large numbers of people'; andhe urges that `these field systems are the equal of modern`scientific' agriculture' (p. 306). The book can be used as a reference work. It is very full of detailsystematically presented; but it carries a moral for holistic research.Chapter I reviews the development of research. Chapters 2 and 3 cover`field types' and crops and technology. There follow four chapterson the Amazon basin “Amazonian” redirects here. For other uses, see Amazonian (disambiguation).The Amazon Basin is the part of South America drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries. and three on irrigation irrigation,in agriculture, artificial watering of the land. Although used chiefly in regions with annual rainfall of less than 20 in. (51 cm), it is also used in wetter areas to grow certain crops, e.g., rice. and terracing in the Andes,with a case study of the Colca Valley. Then there are four on `raisedand drained fields', with separate chapters devoted to thearchaeology of the Llanos de Mojos and the Titicaca basin. Prof. DENEVANconsiders that `we can do a much better job of discovering, mapping, anddescribing Indian fields and of explaining the agricultural changes thatthese fields bare [sic] witness to' (p. 306). Modern archaeologicalresearch in South America, and to the north, has tended to concentrateon settlements. With the author's very notable vision of the grandscheme of South America's history, Cultivated landscapes points theway to much broader investigation.