Boomtown Blues: Archaeologies of Expansion and Collapse in Amazonia

The Archaeological Institute of America's Central Florida Society is pleased to host this year's Doris Z. Stone Lecture: "Boomtown Blues: Archaeologies of Expansion and Collapse in Amazonia", delivered by Dr. Anna T. Browne Ribeiro at the University of Central Florida.

Amazonia has a deep and complex history of human habitation marked by political diversity, ancient practices of environmental engineering, and long-distance networks of communication. As we have seen elsewhere in the world, this deep history is marked by cycles of political or economic consolidation and resource control and maximization, and periods of infrastructural collapse and settlement abandonment.

In this lecture, Dr. Browne Ribeiro will explore some of the major ancient and historic patterns of expansion and contraction of political-economic systems alongside an analysis of resource and land-use strategies. Building on recent findings about environmental shifts and her own ethno-archaeological research, she will grapple with the relative successes of late pre-colonial and modern systems of exploitation and consider these in terms of contemporary risk-management and the future of tropical forest.

You can attend the lecture either in-person or via Zoom. A Zoom link will be sent out to all registered attendees on the day of the lecture. If you do attend the lecture in person, please be aware of all UCF's policies and guidelines, including recommendations to wear a mask and other health safety measures: https://www.ucf.edu/coronavirus/