Résumé
Studying the practices of present-day farmers, and asking what traces these practices would leave for archaeologists to study centuries or millenia later, leads to new questions about pre-Columbian agriculture and could spur the development of new methods to address them. Ascribing too much importance to ethnographic analogy can prevent archaeologists from conceiving of forms of cultural adaptation outside the range of variation observed today. Still, archaeologists cannot afford to ignore the invaluable information provided by present-day systems, which often offer clues to aspects of culture inaccessible to archaeologists, or accessible only after development of new methods. Practices of present-day farmers in Africa offer contemporary examples of emblematic themes in Amazonian archaeology, such as wetland raised-field agriculture in savanna floodplains and the formation of dark-earth anthrosols in forested regions. Practices of farmers throughout the tropics offer insight into slash-and-burn and slash-and-mulch agriculture, which may also have been widespread in pre-Columbian tropical America. Based on work of our team in Africa and South America, we show how comparative study of present and past agricultural systems can inspire new questions. These range from questions about the functioning of soils under different kinds of agriculture—for example, the distributions of combustion-based and decomposition-based systems of managing organic matter—to questions about how environmental influence and human agency interact to shape cultural evolution