Adaptation and low level food production: biarchaelogical evidences from brazilian prehistoric coastal populations.

Abstract

According whith the available archaeological evidence, the civiliization centers around the world have their antecedents in coastal populations with impressive signals of monumentality as an expression of territoriality and sedentary lifestyle. Despite the different trajectories, the evidence suggests that these societies were initially based on a predominantly marine subsistence, becoming agriculturalists of some species relatively earlier. But, while in some regions this change was accompanied by the development of complex socio-political systems that led to states and empires, in other regions the process was apparently stalled through time. This seems to be the case of the Sambaquis of southeastern Brazil. Sambaquis are the only and highest evidence of monumental structures in the Atlantic basin, they were built by archaic coastal populations that developed sedentary lifestyle and elaborate funerary rituals, maintaining stable economic and socio-political systems (probably chiefdoms), for almost 7000 years. Through the reconstruction of the diet with bioantropologic markers (oral pathology, stable isotopes and nutritional stress markers) and other archaeological evidence, this study approach several prehistoric populations of coastal ecosystems from southeastern Brazil in a comparative and diachronic manner. The aim is discover which environmental and economic factors conditioned the relative stability of production systems and lifestyle of these populations over the time.