Early and Middle Holocene human ocuppations in Southwest Amazon

Abstract For many decades, there has bien a debate on whether earliest societies existed in the Amazon rainforest during the Early and Middle Holocene periods. At least for the past 20 years, increasingly strong evidence has placed the Amazon biome on the map of the first human occupations in the American continent. The present paper is part of this effort. It deals with the oldest human occupations evidenced in the upper Madeira River, Rondônia State, Brazil. Essentially, it analyzes the data produced in the publications of Eurico Miller combined with the investigations of the Upper Madeira Project team over the last ten years. Special emphasis is given to the latest interventions at the Teotonio archaeological site, where it was possible to identify and prove the existence of deep layers of human occupation dating from the Early and Middle Holocene.