Tropical Geoarchaeology

The humid tropics occupy a significant portion of the Earth’s terrestrial surface, accounting for around 45% of the Americas, 30% of Africa, and 25% of Asia. These vast areas form the environmental and climatic backdrop against which several key events in human history have taken place. However, tropical environments can present formidable barriers—both physical and intellectual—to geoarchaeological research. First, due to the often remote and inaccessible nature of the environments, as well as the heat, humidity, and dense vegetation associated with them, they are underrepresented in archaeological research (Fig. 1). Second, there is little consensus about the nature of vegetational and geomorphic dynamics in these regions in response to the changing climates that typify the Quaternary. In fact, we are only recently beginning to gain an appreciation of how equatorial regions were exploited by our earliest ancestors and whether rainforests served as barriers to human dispersal or biologically productive environments that were resource-rich and readily used by early humans.