This book focuses on South American archaeology and its contributions to the broader global archaeological discussion in theory, methods and new interpretations of the archaeological record. These include discussions on human peopling and colonization of the continent, domestication of plants and emergence of complex societies. This volume covers a wide variety of sub-disciplines in archaeology, including archaeobotany, zooarchaeology, molecular archaeology, bioarchaeology, geoarchaeology. The chapters span from the pre-Columbian to contemporaneous indigenous societies for all the main geographical and ecological zones of South America. The book discusses how particular cases of South American archaeology have contributed to the understanding of a global and basic issue: human relations with their environments and landscapes during the past. The authors focus on the latest results produced by multidisciplinary studies carried out at archaeological sites in several areas of South America ranging from studies of early hunter-gatherers through the historic period. This work would be of interest to researchers in archaeology and Latin American studies.

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Editor Mariano Bonomo is currently a researcher of the National Council of Scientific and Technological Investigations (CONICET), Deputy Chief of the Archaeology Division of La Plata Museum at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Museum of La Plata (FCNyM), and Professor at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP), Argentina. His major research interests are the past human occupations of aquatic environments in the Paraná River and the Pampean Atlantic coast and the spread of agriculture and Arawak and Tupi-Guarani peoples through Lowland South America. He received both his undergraduate degree (Anthropology) and his doctorate (Natural Sciences) at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina.

Editor Sonia Archila is currently an Associate Professor and the Director of the Department of Anthropology, University of Los Andes, Colombia. She teaches courses in Archaeology, Environmental Archaeology, and Archaeological Method and Theory. She is also the coordinator of the Archaeobotany Laboratory. Her major interests are the study of human-environmental interactions through time and social memory construction, particularly in relation to traditional knowledge of natural resource uses and archaeological heritage. She obtained a Master of Science in Environmental Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and her PhD in Archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, University of London.

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