ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the significance of a regional system perspective for the ongoing debate on the extent of social stratification and agricultural intensification on the floodplains and wet savannas of Pre-Columbian lowland South America. It concludes that the emergence of Arawakan chiefdoms and ethnic identities in such environments after the first millennium B.c.e. signifies the occupation of a niche defined in terms of both ecology and regional exchange, but also that it transformed both these kinds of conditions. In these processes, ethnicity, social stratification, economy, and ecology were all recursively intertwined.
