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Historical Ecology and the Explanation of Diversity: Amazonian Case Studies

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Applied Ecology and Human Dimensions in Biological Conservation

Abstract

Historical ecology is a research program concerned with the effects of interactions between humans and the environment. These interactions are understood as forms of landscape transformation. Species diversity is one of the principal foci in the historical–ecological study of landscape transformation. In conservation biology, humans are usually not considered to effect increases in diversity except as consequences of secondary succession and the intermediate disturbance hypothesis, if at all. In the study of Amazonia, evidence suggests that humans not only changed forest composition as a result of extensive agriculture (secondary landscape transformation) but also built environments that supported forests that were otherwise nonexistent before human intervention. Human intervention can also account for the existence of some “forest-dependent” species. In light of past human activities and the ensuing effects of these on Amazonian forests, historical ecology provides a working model of explanation of alpha diversity that is more complete than alternative models, including vicariance biogeography, refuge theory, and environmental gradients, when taken in isolation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, 101 Dinwiddie Hall, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA

    William Balée

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  1. William Balée
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Correspondence to William Balée .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centro de Energia Nuclear na Agricultura, Universidade de São Paulo, Piracicaba, São Paulo, Brazil

    Luciano M. Verdade

  2. Curso de Ciências Biológicas, Universidade de Santo Amaro, São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Maria Carolina Lyra-Jorge

  3. Transferencia de Tecnología a la Producción, Centro de Investigaciones Científicas y, Rios, Argentina

    Carlos I. Piña

Appendix

Appendix

Viveiros de Castro (1996) uses the term “standard” model of Amazon ethnology to refer to what I am calling the adaptationist model.

Recent evidence posits that Incan civilization, in a military if not also economic and cultural sense, did indeed penetrate and influence Amazonian prehistory, at least in the upper Amazon (Pärssinen and Korpisaari 2003).

I mean “research program” in the sense of Lakatos (1980) and would distinguish it from the “paradigm” concept of Kuhn (1970) (though I did not do so originally—Balée 1998). The reason for the distinction is historical ecology is probably not a paradigm (cf. Biersack 1999: 8–9), since paradigms demand overwhelming consensus in the scientific community, and all essential problems (in this case, research problems concerning humans and the environment) need to have their own models of explication and deduction that originate in the axioms of the paradigm. Such consensus does not yet exist in historical ecology. The term research program is less rigid and more appropriate to the notion of historical ecology, allowing as it does for less consensus but a relatively widely connected body of research, and does exist in historical ecology (e.g., Crumley 1994, 2001; Balée 1998, 2006).

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Balée, W. (2014). Historical Ecology and the Explanation of Diversity: Amazonian Case Studies. In: Verdade, L., Lyra-Jorge, M., Piña, C. (eds) Applied Ecology and Human Dimensions in Biological Conservation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-54751-5_2

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