Linking Past and Present Land-Use Histories in Southern Amazonas, Peru

Abstract

This paper analyzes remotely sensed data sources to evaluate land-use history within the Peruvian department of Amazonas and demonstrates the utility of comparing present and past land-use patterns using continuous datasets, as a complement to the often dispersed and discrete data produced by archaeological and paleoecological field studies. We characterize the distribution of ancient (ca. AD 1–1550) terracing based on data drawn from high-resolution satellite imagery and compare it to patterns of deforestation between 2001 and 2019, based on time-series Landsat data. We find that the patterns reflected in these two datasets are statistically different, indicating a distinctive shift in land-use, which we link to the history of Inka and Spanish colonialism and Indigenous depopulation in the 15th through 17th centuries AD as well as the growth of road infrastructure and economic change in the recent past. While there is a statistically significant relationship between areas of ancient terracing and modern-day patterns of deforestation, this relationship ultimately explains little (6%) of the total pattern of modern forest loss, indicating that ancient land-use patterns do not seem to be structuring modern-day trajectories of land-use. Together, these results shed light on the long-term history of land-use in Amazonas and their enduring legacies in the present.