ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how competing models of domestication and human impact are currently playing out in debates over indigenous “footprints” in the Amazon basin in pre-Colombian times. These questions might be viewed as arcana in a scientific debate, except that these controversies illuminate divergent ideologies about nature, domestication, and social impacts on landscapes. From the perspective of science and technology studies, this debate involves differing epistemic communities, their sociologies, and their explanatory framings. These analytics also pertain to broader questions such as the implications of historic land use for climate change, dating the Anthropocene, civilizational discourses about native peoples, current development, and indigenous land politics in Amazonia.
