Early Utilization of Flood-Recession Soils as a Response to The Intensification of Fishing and Upland Agriculture: Resource-Use Dynamics in a Large Tikuna Community

The optimal use of Amazonian flood-recession soils in contexts of dense settlement is, according to many anthropologists, agronomists, and ecologists, the cultivation of proteinaceous cereals and legumes. Storable protein is thought to be necessary for nutritional security through the fish-poor season. Campo Alegre, a Tikuna floodplain community of over 1300 people, is one of the largest indigenous Amazonian communities in the contemporary ethnographic record. Furthermore, some two-thirds of its agricultural production is directed toward market sale. However, in the summers of 1994 and 1995, residents cultivated no proteinaceous crops on their extensive floodplain to store for later consumption. Their utilization of these soils, a relatively new resource for them, is best understood in relation to the intensification of two traditional resource bases—fisheries and upland soils, the resulting pressures on their production flows, and the desire to maintain them.