Human Environmental Impacts Introducer: Susanna B. Hecht

Abstract

It is difficult to overstate how influential William Denevan’s research and writings have been. His work, derived from the school of landscape analytics at Berkeley, was profoundly influenced by forms of interdisciplinarity that were unusual for the time and provided the empirical research that would give rise to alternative positions to the functionalist cultural ecological theories, under development ideologies, and the ahistorical views of the Amazonia that placed the region as a tabula rasa and knowledge void. His own work on historical demography provided the archival impetus, and his experience as a journalist in Peru gave him initial experience in the field, which if one were not enchanted by ideas of Amazonian primitivism could provide ample evidence of the engineering and ecological cultures that had been annihilated in the great dying. His own research embraced indigenous agricultures of multiple types, and his master work Cultivated landscapes of native Amazonia and the Andes (2001) provides an indispensable overview. At a time when analytic focus lays firmly in annual cropping systems, his sweep was remarkable and paradigm breaking. His attention to wetlands, terraces, lake cultivation, and fallow stimulated research into what became a recognition not just of the diversity of systems but of the management within them. His studies of fallow management opened up the reality of studies of the anthropogenic Amazon that have recast its history and landscape.