Cultural Development, Language Distribution, and Ecology in Pre-Columbian Amazonia

The thesis aims at creating a large-scale GIS database covering Amazonian prehistory between 2000 BC and AD 1700 in order to be able to test the hypothesis of ethnic circumscription described above. This database will be compiled of geographically positioned material from archaeology (datings, ceramic styles, tempering materials, rock art, anthropogenic soils, and other visual aspects of material culture); historical linguistics (linguistic distribution maps); ethnography (historical material culture with analogies to prehistory, trade routes, and the spatial extent of indigenous groups); and geography and ecology (mapping of soil types, vegetation zones, climate changes, and water flows)