Indigenous Agroecology Introducer: Charles R. Clement

The two book chapters in this section synthesize William Denevan’s thinking about how Native Amazonians created and managed agroforestry systems for food production and in the process created an anthropogenic soil called brown earth (terra mulata). The practices involved were labor intensive, because of the use of stone and wooden tools, allied with burning of semi-dry organic wastes, resulting in continual additions of charred biomass to the soil, which fertilized the food plants and created these brown earths. William Denevan did not use the term agroecology, but many of these practices are resurgent today in agroecological farming methods.