J Iriarte
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 17354 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | J Iriarte |
| NOMBRES | J |
| APELLIDO | Iriarte |
| FIRMA | IRIARTE J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Exeter |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8155-5360 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 55 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 548 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 55 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 14 |
Twelve millennia of plant use in the Northwest Amazon
Cerro Montoya 1 (CM1), in the Serranía de La Lindosa (Guaviare, Colombia), preserves one of the longest and most detailed multi-proxy archaeobotanical sequences in north-western Amazonia, spanning from the Late Pleistocene (∼12.6 cal ka BP) to the early Colonial period (∼0.4 cal ka BP). Integrated analyses of plant macroremains, phytoliths, starch grains, and charred parenchyma reveal a remarkably stable, broad-spectrum subsistence strategy from …
Joining hands
Hand depictions are among the most widespread motifs in global rock art, appearing from the Pleistocene to the present and often representing some of the earliest symbolic practices. At Cerro Azul and Paredones del Potrero in Amazonian Colombia, red handprints feature diverse decorations – including spirals, braided lines and geometric infill – whose production and significance remain little understood. This study presents the first detailed typo…
Assessing the Role of Plant Seasonalities on the Regional Organisation of the Tapajó Society
Human food practices involve procurement and production activities, including cleaning, planting, weeding, fertilisation, irrigation, and management, all influenced by seasonality. Plant phenology is the main seasonality index in Amazonian food production. This exploratory study reviews Tapajó archaeobotanical data to estimate how seasonal planting and harvesting affected regional organisations. The data originate from four Tapajó habitation site…
Mid- to late-Holocene hydroclimate and vegetation changes near the Amazon-Tapajós confluence
The rainforests and freshwater resources of lowland Amazonia depend on precipitation from the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and the South American Summer Monsoon (SASM). However, our understanding of the climate and vegetation history of lowland Amazonia, particularly its response to the dynamics of the ITCZ and SASM, is limited by the lack of Holocene paleohydroclimate and paleoenvironmental records from eastern Amazonia. Here, we presen…
New insights into the formation process and chronology of the Sambaqui Morro do Ouro, Joinville, Santa Catarina, Brazil
Sambaquis are unique cultural heritage assets in Brazil, encapsulating Indigenous cultures and ecological knowledge that thrived for nearly 7,000 years in some of the world's most diverse biomes. Despite decades of scientific research, uncertainties remain regarding their origins and evolving nature and their role in major socio-economic and demographic shifts linked to food production systems in the Americas. Additionally, gaps persist in our un…
‘A World of Knowledge’
There are tens of thousands of painted rock art motifs in the Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon, including humans, animals, therianthropes, geometrics, and flora. For most of the last 100 years, inaccessibility and political unrest has limited research activities in the region. In this paper, we discuss findings from six years of field research and consider the role of rock art as a manifestation of Indigenous ontologies. By employin…
What do paleoecological data tell us about the Amazon Anthropocene
Recently, Roberts et al. (2023) defined three socioeconomic thresholds thought to have laid the foundations for the Anthropocene: the first, between 4000 and 1000 BCE, related to the beginnings of agriculture; the second, between 0 and 1500 CE, related to urbanism and the demographic consolidation of human populations; and the third, between 1500 and the present CE, associated with the advance of colonialism and capitalism. In this article, we di…
O que os dados paleoecológicos nos dizem sobre o Antropoceno na Amazônia
Recentemente, Roberts et al. (2023) definiram três thresholds socioeconômicos que teriam sido a base do Antropoceno no mundo: o primeiro, entre 4.000 e 1.000 AEC, relacionado ao início da agricultura; o segundo, entre 0 e 1.500 EC, relacionado ao urbanismo e à consolidação demográfica das populações humanas; e o terceiro, entre 1.500 EC e o presente, associado ao avanço do colonialismo e do capitalismo. Neste artigo, discutimos os resultados de e…
Animals of the Serranía de la Lindosa
The Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon hosts one of the most spectacular global rock art traditions. Painted in vibrant ochre pigments, the artwork depicts abstract and figurative designs – including a high diversity of animal motifs – and holds key information for understanding how Amazonians made sense of their world. We compare a zooarchaeological assemblage with painted depictions of animals at the Cerro Azul site, and utilise rel…
Pre-Hispanic terrace agricultural practices and long-distance transfer of plant taxa in the southern-central Peruvian Andes revealed by phytolith and pollen analysis
The archaeological excavation of two abandoned prehispanic agricultural terraces (Infiernillo and Tocotoccasa) in the Chicha-Soras Valley (Apurimac) in southern-central Peru revealed the presence of palaeosols. The palaeosols represent soil that developed following construction of agricultural terraces during the Middle Horizon. The soil profiles at the current surface developed following reconstruction of the terraces during the Late Intermediat…
A glimpse into shell mound builders’ diet during mid-to-late Holocene on Marajó island
Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon
Archaeological remains of agrarian-based, low-density urbananism 1–3 have been reported to exist beneath the tropical forests of Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and Central America 4–6 . However, beyond some large interconnected settlements in southern Amazonia 7–9 , there has been no such evidence for pre-Hispanic Amazonia. Here we present lidar data of sites belonging to the Casarabe culture (around ad 500 to ad 1400) 10–13 in the Llanos de Mojos sav…
Colonisation and early peopling of the Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene
Moving South
The role of plants in early human migrations across the globe has received little attention compared to big game hunting. Tropical forests in particular have been seen as a barrier for Late Pleistocene human dispersals due to perceived difficulties in obtaining sufficient subsistence resources. Archaeobotanical data from the Cerro Azul rock outcrop in the Colombian Amazon details Late Pleistocene plant exploitation providing insight into early hu…
Refining the Chronology and Occupation Dynamics of the Mound Villages of South-Eastern Acre, Brazil
This paper summarises recent test excavations at five Mound Village sites in the south-eastern sector of Acre state, Brazil, including Caboquinho, Boa Esperança, Tocantins, Dos Circulos IV and V. Radiocarbon dates obtained from the excavation of this site refine the chronology of this archaeological tradition. To improve the chronologies of the mound villages in Acre for which radiocarbon dates were available, we modelled them using Bayesian stat…
Recent Advances in the Archaeology of the Southern Proto-Jê People
The origins of Amazonian landscapes
Early Holocene crop cultivation and landscape modification in Amazonia
Geometry by Design
Recent research has shown that the entire southern rim of Amazonia was inhabited by earth-building societies involving landscape engineering, landscape domestication and likely low-density urbanism during the Late Holocene. However, the scale, timing, and intensity of human settlement in this region remain unknown due to the dearth of archaeological work and the logistical difficulties associated with research in tropical forest environments. A c…
Anthropogenic soil and settlement organisation in the Bolivian Amazon
Anthropogenic soils known as Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) have long been known as a key component of subsistence systems for various pre‐Columbian Amazonian populations. Often treated as a single category, ADE systems consist of two broad anthrosols (human‐modified soils): the darker ADE (traditionally known as terra preta ) and a lighter brown Amazonian Brown Earth (ABE; traditionally known as terra mulata ). Data on the characteristics and spat…
Water, movement and landscape ordering
Recent Advances in the Archaeology of the Southern Proto-Jê People
The legacy of 4,500 years of polyculture agroforestry in the eastern Amazon
Impact of pre-Columbian “geoglyph” builders on Amazonian forests
Significance Amazonian rainforests once thought to be pristine wildernesses are increasingly known to have been inhabited by large populations before European contact. How and to what extent these societies impacted their landscape through deforestation and forest management is still controversial, particularly in the vast interfluvial uplands that have been little studied. In Brazil, the groundbreaking discovery of hundreds of geometric earthwor…
A Multicentre and stratified study of the attitude of medical students towards organ donation in Spain
Spanish medical students generally have a favourable attitude towards organ donation, although 20% are not in favour
Diversity of cultivars and other plant resources used at habitation sites in the Llanos de Mojos, Beni, Bolivia
Landscape transformation, mounded villages and adopted cultigens
New research in lowland South America is beginning to reveal a diversity of complex cultural trajectories in a region that was long-considered marginal with respect to Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations. This paper summarizes new archaeological, palaeoecological and archaebotanical data from Los Ajos site, south-eastern Uruguay, showing that a changing and increasingly dry mid-Holocene climate was associated with significant cultural transform…
Integrated palaeoecology and archaeology - a powerful approach for understanding pre-Columbian Amazonia
Phytoliths as a tool for investigations of agricultural origins and dispersals around the world
Pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture and land use in the Bolivian Amazon
We present an integrated palaeoecological and archaeobotanical study of pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture in the Llanos de Moxos, a vast seasonally inundated forest-savanna mosaic in the Bolivian Amazon. Phytoliths from excavated raised-field soil units, together with pollen and charcoal in sediment cores from two oxbow lakes, were analysed to provide a history of land use and agriculture at the El Cerro raised-field site. The construction o…
Emergent Complexity, Changing Landscapes, and Spheres of Interaction in Southeastern South America During the Middle and Late Holocene
Newly created academic programs at Brazilian universities have provided the impetus for new archaeological projects in southeastern South America during the last two decades. The new data are changing our views on emergent social complexity, natural and human-induced transformation of the landscape, and transcontinental expansions and cultural interactions across the Río de la Plata basin during the Middle and Late Holocene. We concentrate on six…
Late Holocene Neotropical agricultural landscapes
Monumental burials and memorial feasting
What happened at the sites of prehistoric burial mounds after they were erected? In the southern highlands of Brazil and Argentina the pre-Hispanic mounds of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries AD are surrounded by large circular enclosures with avenues leading to their centre. The authors discovered that the banks of the surrounding enclosure were built up over several generations of time, accompanied by a succession of ovens. Ethnohistoric observa…
The expansion of Araucaria forest in the southern Brazilian highlands during the last 4000 years and its implications for the development of the Taquara/Itararé Tradition
An examination of the late Holocene environmental and cultural sequences of the southern Brazilian highlands indicates that the colonisation of this region by the Taquara/Itararé people is associated with the expansion of Araucaria forest resulting from the onset of wetter climatic conditions in the region, which started between around 1410 and 900 cal. yr BP. The more intense and permanent human occupation of this region is associated with the a…
Out of Amazonia
The late-Holocene expansion of the Tupi-Guarani languages from southern Amazonia to SE South America constitutes one of the largest expansions of any linguistic family in the world, spanning ~4000 km between latitudes 0°S and 35°S at about 2.5k cal. yr BP. However, the underlying reasons for this expansion are a matter of debate. Here, we compare continental-scale palaeoecological, palaeoclimate and archaeological datasets, to examine the role of…
Pre-Columbian land use in the ring-ditch region of the Bolivian Amazon
The nature and extent of pre-Columbian (pre-AD 1492) human impact in Amazonia is a contentious issue. The Bolivian Amazon has yielded some of the most impressive evidence for large and complex pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon basin, yet there remains relatively little data concerning the land use of these societies over time. Palaeoecology, when integrated with archaeological data, has the potential to fill these gaps in our knowledge. We pr…
Revisiting the economy and mobility of southern proto-Jê (Taquara-Itararé) groups in the southern Brazilian highlands
Water, movement and landscape ordering
Narrowing the Gap
Assessing the feasibility of identifying maize through the analysis of cross-shaped size and three-dimensional morphology of phytoliths in the grasslands of southeastern South America
Anthropogenic soil and settlement organisation in the Bolivian Amazon
Anthropogenic soils known as Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) have long been known as a key component of subsistence systems for various pre‐Columbian Amazonian populations. Often treated as a single category, ADE systems consist of two broad anthrosols (human‐modified soils): the darker ADE (traditionally known as terra preta ) and a lighter brown Amazonian Brown Earth (ABE; traditionally known as terra mulata ). Data on the characteristics and spat…
An improved methodology for the recovery of Zea mays and other large crop pollen, with implications for environmental archaeology in the Neotropics
We present a simple sieving methodology to aid the recovery of large cultigen pollen grains, such as maize ( Zea mays L.), manioc ( Manihot esculenta Crantz), and sweet potato ( Ipomoea batatas L.), among others, for the detection of food production using fossil pollen analysis of lake sediments in the tropical Americas. The new methodology was tested on three large study lakes located next to known and/or excavated pre-Columbian archaeological s…
Moving South
The role of plants in early human migrations across the globe has received little attention compared to big game hunting. Tropical forests in particular have been seen as a barrier for Late Pleistocene human dispersals due to perceived difficulties in obtaining sufficient subsistence resources. Archaeobotanical data from the Cerro Azul rock outcrop in the Colombian Amazon details Late Pleistocene plant exploitation providing insight into early hu…
Moieties and Mortuary Mounds
Excavations at Abreu Garcia provide a detailed case study of a mound and enclosure mortuary complex used by the southern proto-Jê in the southern Brazilian highlands. The recovery of 16 secondary cremation deposits within a single mound allows an in-depth discussion of spatial aspects of mortuary practices. A spatial division in the placement of the interments adds another level of duality to the mortuary landscape, which comprises: (1) paired mo…
Chronology, mound-building and environment at Huaca Prieta, coastal Peru, from 13 700 to 4000 years ago
Renewed in-depth multi-disciplinary investigation of a large coastal mound settlement in Peru has extended the occupation back more than 7000 years to a first human exploitation ~13720 BP. Research by the authors has chronicled the prehistoric sequence from the activities of the first maritime foragers to the construction of the black mound and the introduction of horticulture and monumentality. The community of Huaca Prieta emerges as innovative…
"Comentario Sobre "Montículos de la Cuenca de la Laguna Merín
En el apéndice de su articulo reciente, Bracco (2006:511-540) realiza una serie de comentarios e interpretaciones de la evidencia científica interdisciplinaria producida por nuestro equipo en el sitio de Los Ajos en el sureste de Uruguay. Entre otras cosas, Bracco nos imputa: (a) de haber retrocedido la problemática de investigación en el área veinte años atrás, (b) de desconocer los trabajos anteriores realizados en la región, (c) de forzar nues…
Animals of the Serranía de la Lindosa
The Serranía de la Lindosa in the Colombian Amazon hosts one of the most spectacular global rock art traditions. Painted in vibrant ochre pigments, the artwork depicts abstract and figurative designs – including a high diversity of animal motifs – and holds key information for understanding how Amazonians made sense of their world. We compare a zooarchaeological assemblage with painted depictions of animals at the Cerro Azul site, and utilise rel…
Pre-Hispanic terrace agricultural practices and long-distance transfer of plant taxa in the southern-central Peruvian Andes revealed by phytolith and pollen analysis
The archaeological excavation of two abandoned prehispanic agricultural terraces (Infiernillo and Tocotoccasa) in the Chicha-Soras Valley (Apurimac) in southern-central Peru revealed the presence of palaeosols. The palaeosols represent soil that developed following construction of agricultural terraces during the Middle Horizon. The soil profiles at the current surface developed following reconstruction of the terraces during the Late Intermediat…
News from the field ou como um projeto internacional começa a sair do papel
O presente texto apresenta as questões centrais de pesquisa do projeto Paisagens Jê do Sul do Brasil e também traz resultados preliminares do primeiro ano de atividades de pesquisa em Arqueologia e Paleoecologia
What do paleoecological data tell us about the Amazon Anthropocene
Recently, Roberts et al. (2023) defined three socioeconomic thresholds thought to have laid the foundations for the Anthropocene: the first, between 4000 and 1000 BCE, related to the beginnings of agriculture; the second, between 0 and 1500 CE, related to urbanism and the demographic consolidation of human populations; and the third, between 1500 and the present CE, associated with the advance of colonialism and capitalism. In this article, we di…
Assessing the feasibility of identifying maize through the analysis of cross-shaped size and three-dimensional morphology of phytoliths in the grasslands of southeastern South America
Evidence for cultivar adoption and emerging complexity during the mid-Holocene in the La Plata basin
Landscape transformation, mounded villages and adopted cultigens
New research in lowland South America is beginning to reveal a diversity of complex cultural trajectories in a region that was long-considered marginal with respect to Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations. This paper summarizes new archaeological, palaeoecological and archaebotanical data from Los Ajos site, south-eastern Uruguay, showing that a changing and increasingly dry mid-Holocene climate was associated with significant cultural transform…
La construcción social y transformación de las comunidades del Periodo Formativo Temprano del sureste de Uruguay
Nuevas investigaciones en las tierras bajas de Sudamérica están comenzando a revelar una diversidad de trayectorias culturales complejas y únicas en una parte de Sudamérica que ha sido tradicionalmente considerada como un área marginal en comparación con las civilizaciones que se desarrollaron en los Andes centrales y Mesoamérica. Este artículo resume nuevos datos arqueológicos, arqueobotánicos y paleoecológicos del sitio Los Ajos, en el sureste …
The expansion of Araucaria forest in the southern Brazilian highlands during the last 4000 years and its implications for the development of the Taquara/Itararé Tradition
An examination of the late Holocene environmental and cultural sequences of the southern Brazilian highlands indicates that the colonisation of this region by the Taquara/Itararé people is associated with the expansion of Araucaria forest resulting from the onset of wetter climatic conditions in the region, which started between around 1410 and 900 cal. yr BP. The more intense and permanent human occupation of this region is associated with the a…
"Comentario Sobre "Montículos de la Cuenca de la Laguna Merín
En el apéndice de su articulo reciente, Bracco (2006:511-540) realiza una serie de comentarios e interpretaciones de la evidencia científica interdisciplinaria producida por nuestro equipo en el sitio de Los Ajos en el sureste de Uruguay. Entre otras cosas, Bracco nos imputa: (a) de haber retrocedido la problemática de investigación en el área veinte años atrás, (b) de desconocer los trabajos anteriores realizados en la región, (c) de forzar nues…
Monumental burials and memorial feasting
What happened at the sites of prehistoric burial mounds after they were erected? In the southern highlands of Brazil and Argentina the pre-Hispanic mounds of the twelfth-thirteenth centuries AD are surrounded by large circular enclosures with avenues leading to their centre. The authors discovered that the banks of the surrounding enclosure were built up over several generations of time, accompanied by a succession of ovens. Ethnohistoric observa…
The cultural and chronological context of early Holocene maize and squash domestication in the Central Balsas River Valley, Mexico
Molecular evidence indicates that the wild ancestor of maize is presently native to the seasonally dry tropical forest of the Central Balsas watershed in southwestern Mexico. We report here on archaeological investigations in a region of the Central Balsas located near the Iguala Valley in Guerrero state that show for the first time a long sequence of human occupation and plant exploitation reaching back to the early Holocene. One of the sites ex…
Phytolith analysis of selected native plants and modern soils from southeastern Uruguay and its implications for paleoenvironmental and archeological reconstruction
Narrowing the Gap
Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia
The scale and nature of pre-Columbian human impacts in Amazonia are currently hotly debated. Whereas pre-Columbian people dramatically changed the distribution and abundance of species and habitats in some parts of Amazonia, their impact in other parts is less clear. Pioneer research asked whether their effects reached even further, changing how ecosystems function, but few in-depth studies have examined mechanisms underpinning the resilience of …
Late Holocene Neotropical agricultural landscapes
Diversity of cultivars and other plant resources used at habitation sites in the Llanos de Mojos, Beni, Bolivia
An improved methodology for the recovery of Zea mays and other large crop pollen, with implications for environmental archaeology in the Neotropics
We present a simple sieving methodology to aid the recovery of large cultigen pollen grains, such as maize ( Zea mays L.), manioc ( Manihot esculenta Crantz), and sweet potato ( Ipomoea batatas L.), among others, for the detection of food production using fossil pollen analysis of lake sediments in the tropical Americas. The new methodology was tested on three large study lakes located next to known and/or excavated pre-Columbian archaeological s…
Integrated palaeoecology and archaeology - a powerful approach for understanding pre-Columbian Amazonia
As Culturas Do Milho? Arqueobotânica Das Sociedades Hidráulicas Das Terras Baixas Sul-Americanas
No presente artigo, se apresenta uma síntese dos estudos arqueobotânicos realizados em sítios agrícolas de zonas úmidas pré-Colombianos das terás baixas sul-americanas. Se resume a evidência obtida através do estudo de macro- e microvestígios botânicos recuperados tanto de feições agrícolas como de sítios arqueológicos de habitação e sedimentos lacustres associados aos mesmos. A análise dos dados mostra que uma grande diversidade de plantas foram…
Chronology, mound-building and environment at Huaca Prieta, coastal Peru, from 13 700 to 4000 years ago
Renewed in-depth multi-disciplinary investigation of a large coastal mound settlement in Peru has extended the occupation back more than 7000 years to a first human exploitation ~13720 BP. Research by the authors has chronicled the prehistoric sequence from the activities of the first maritime foragers to the construction of the black mound and the introduction of horticulture and monumentality. The community of Huaca Prieta emerges as innovative…
Pre-Columbian landscape impact and agriculture in the Monumental Mound region of the Llanos de Moxos , lowland Bolivia
We present a multiproxy study of land use by a pre-Columbian earth mounds culture in the Bolivian Amazon. The Monumental Mounds Region (MMR) is an archaeological sub-region characterized by hundreds of pre-Columbian habitation mounds associated with a complex network of canals and causeways, and situated in the forest–savanna mosaic of the Llanos de Moxos . Pollen, phytolith, and charcoal analyses were performed on a sediment core from a large la…
Sacred landscapes of the southern Brazilian highlands
Phytoliths from the coastal savannas of French Guiana
Pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture and land use in the Bolivian Amazon
We present an integrated palaeoecological and archaeobotanical study of pre-Columbian raised-field agriculture in the Llanos de Moxos, a vast seasonally inundated forest-savanna mosaic in the Bolivian Amazon. Phytoliths from excavated raised-field soil units, together with pollen and charcoal in sediment cores from two oxbow lakes, were analysed to provide a history of land use and agriculture at the El Cerro raised-field site. The construction o…
Phytoliths as a tool for investigations of agricultural origins and dispersals around the world
Revisiting the economy and mobility of southern proto-Jê (Taquara-Itararé) groups in the southern Brazilian highlands
Pre-Columbian land use in the ring-ditch region of the Bolivian Amazon
The nature and extent of pre-Columbian (pre-AD 1492) human impact in Amazonia is a contentious issue. The Bolivian Amazon has yielded some of the most impressive evidence for large and complex pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon basin, yet there remains relatively little data concerning the land use of these societies over time. Palaeoecology, when integrated with archaeological data, has the potential to fill these gaps in our knowledge. We pr…
The genesis of monuments
Geography (48 obras) · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory (47 obras) · Archaeology (40 obras) · Biology (31 obras) · Ecology (25 obras) · Archaeology and ancient environmental studies (19 obras) · Amazon rainforest (18 obras) · Cassava research and cyanide (17 obras) · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies (14 obras) · Holocene (13 obras)