Summary

Interaction is viewed within anthropological theory as an important causal mechanism for culture change. It has played an especially prominent role in western South American archaeology due to the dramatic environmental transitions that occur across the continental divide from Pacific coastal deserts to the Andean highlands and the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest, thereby putting peoples into proximity to a variety of resources from different geographical zones. Indeed, the degree to which Amazonian and Andean populations engaged in interregional interaction prior to European contact has been a fundamental question within South American archaeology since its foundation. While these adjacent geographical zones have traditionally been characterized as separate archaeological culture areas, various types of indirect evidence from comparisons of art styles and iconography to historical linguistics and ethnohistoric accounts have indicated that goods, ideas, and people moved between the Andes and the Amazon as early as the initial peopling of the Americas to the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire, impacting long-term cultural developments within each region. Unfortunately, archaeological inquiries into this subject were historically impeded by the logistical difficulties of working in tropical forest environments, preconceived notions concerning environmental barriers and limitations that would have minimized interregional movement, and the perishability and abstract nature of the types of evidence that would confer interaction between the Andes and the Amazon. Since the early 2000s, however, major advances have occurred in fields such as remote sensing, petrology, paleobotany, bioarchaeology and genetics, and linguistics. These advances, in combination with increased interest and investigation in the intermediate eastern Andean montane forest (or ceja de selva) and western Amazonian lowlands, have allowed scholars to better reconstruct the cultural histories of tropical forest societies as well as provide new avenues for identifying evidence of Amazonian-Andean interactions. The resulting evidence presents a complex pattern of interaction that varies considerably across time and space as it relates to the type of relationships that occurred and the materials and ideas that were exchanged, one that requires greater focus on the mechanisms behind these processes.