Harvesting the winds, harvesting the rain: an introduction to the issue on Inhabiting tropical worlds

Abstract

The tropics occupy one third of the earth’s landmass and are home to more than 40% of the global population. They were destinations of many voyages that changed modern human history and the location of many of the greatest scientific discoveries and observations that have profoundly shaped the direction and advancement of scientific research (e.g. Charles Darwin’s Galapagos experiences). They continue to stimulate great public interest – Sir David Attenborough’s popular tropical television documentaries are a great manifestation of this – and research on the tropics continues to shift the boundaries of our scientific quest into the planet’s natural history. The latter includes recent scientific recognition of the importance of carbon storage and sequestration in Africa’s tropical forests and wetlands and how these processes might contribute to further our understanding of global carbon cycles and ecological changes (Lewis et al. 2009). Despite these great scientific achievements, the tropics remain largely remote and often exotic imaginaries in mainstream academic discourse and our understanding of the deep histories of tropical inhabitation and human adaptation is particularly sparse (Mercader 2003), compared to that of the global temperate zones. The gaps in our knowledge of tropical human pasts have also commonly led to the isolation of tropical societies from consideration in broader syntheses, with the lowland American tropics being perhaps best served (e.g. Clasby and Nesbitt 2021; Lippi 2004; Stahl 1995). Although some recent archaeological discoveries have brought the tropics into the spotlight in efforts to establish an inclusive global history (e.g. Bulliet et al. 2014), the archaeology of the tropics is still under-represented despite the recent attempts to highlight the importance of tropical rainforests to understanding both the ‘deep history’ of our species (Scerri et al. 2022) and ‘the Anthropocene’ (Roberts, Hamilton, and Piperno 2021). In academic debates on the fundamental archaeological questions such as the origins of modern humans, agriculture and early states, the voice of tropical archaeology remains limited. One of the technical challenges in the archaeology of tropical inhabitation, as acknowledged by many researchers, is the generally poor preservation of not only palaeoecological evidence but also perishable architectural remains of past lives due to the common (although by no means universal) acid soil conditions and other taphonomic issues (but note also that earthen and stone architecture can be well preserved in some tropical settings). Although the growing application of scientific techniques has started to overturn the wholly negative pictures of what the tropics can offer us to disentangle their complicated histories, the macroscopic perspectives and microscopic observations that are increasingly adopted by scholars remain to be robustly integrated to create more holistic reconstructions of how ancient populations interacted with their environments. Indeed, our appreciation of the exceptional diversity of tropical inhabitation is only in its infancy, as is recognition of the significantly varied historical processes that underpin such an intrinsic diversity. Hence, one of the main objectives of this issue of World Archaeology is to bridge the analytical divide between ‘household archaeology’ and ‘landscape WORLD ARCHAEOLOGY 2021, VOL. 53, NO. 4, 563–578 https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.2021.2062885