 Good morning, everyone. My name is Mariana Casino. I work at the Mamira Wine Institute. It's a research institute in the Brazilian Amazon. And I'm going to present to you this work, moving a little from this region that Javier presented in Amazon, an area of Savanna. We are moving to the very tropical forest in the Middle Southern West region. So this work was made with the collaboration of biologists and archaeologists working in Brazil, Murto Choc, Ibrahim Freire, Rafael Lopes, Marcio Dima, Fernanda Almeida, and Eduardo Tamana. So one of the big issues in the Amazonian archaeology today is how and to what degree did pre-Columbian populations transform the landscape in in Amazonia? And for example, through their farming strategies, usually slashing burn techniques, and also for their foraging strategies like hunting and the use of forest products, for example. And the second question that comes from this first one is how can we seek these pre-Columbian transformations in the landscape today? So as Javier just pointed, when we look at the Amazon basin, we can find various tracking marks of these pre-Columbian transformations, like, for example, the Amazonian dark earths, which are on tropic soils, and we can find those all around the Amazon basin, especially along the main rivers, but also a lot of soft types of earthworks, like irrigation channels, mounds, and pathways, which are all the results of settlements and cultivation fields in the Amazon. But we know that Amazonian populations also have very subtle ways of managing the forest, and these are not so much explored in Amazonian archaeology. They may not leave very striking marks in the landscape, but they are also likely to leave some very permanent marks, especially in the changes of the the floristic composition of the major forests. So in this work we discuss how the archaeobotanical record that we found on trash feedings and other domestic deposits of the settlement, the pre-Columbian settlement in the Amazon basin, can be used to help us make inferences about those diversified ways of managing the forest that can go way beyond the limits of the settlement, where we found those archaeobotanical remains. So we excavated the San Juan archaeological site located here in this region, the Mido Salimois region. It's located on the banks of the Salimois River, which is the biggest river in the Amazon basin. This site was occupied between circa 900 to 1400 AD, so the late Holocene, and it was occupied by populations producing ceramics belonging to the Amazonian polychrome tradition, which is a ceramic tradition related to the expansion of two speaking groups in the Amazon at the beginning of the second millennium AD. So at this period in the Amazon we see the partial abandonment of the occupation of the headwaters and the lakes, and a very massive occupation of the main rivers banks by a very growing population and very sedentary too. So in the San Juan site we excavated four deposits of Amazonian dark earths, and we collected the sediment and flotated it, so we separated the plate shaft remains. These remains were separated between wood and fruits and seeds, and I'm going to discuss here the fruits and seeds that we identified with the help of our reference collection when they had diagnostic features. So I'm going to show you the results, the main species and families we identified and tried to discuss this with the ways of management of these plants that we see today in the Amazon. So I'm going to present them from the more abundant to the less abundant, beginning with the pound family. We found a great variety of pounds in the Archiboteric Record of the San Juan site. Some of them could identify the genus like astrocarium and oenocarpus, both of them occur on the landscape of this site today. The pound family is probably the most useful family for Amazonian populations today. It's used, every species of this family is used today, for example for construction, but also for food, and some of the species are cultivated and some of them are managed, for example the tucumon palm, this one which is an astrocarium palm is managed with fire, when people open fields with fire the tucumon palm spontaneously grow on these areas. We also found the teobroma species, probably cacao, teobroma cacao, which is also a species that we can observe very commonly being cultivated in the Amazon, and in the middle salmons we identified lots of species of this genus growing, forming patches, and all of them are used by local populations because teobroma produces a fruit that is very appreciated by local populations. Some of these patches are cultivated and some of them are just managed by local populations. We also found the brazilian tree remains, which also forms very wide growth in the middle salmons region, and there is a great discussion about the anthropic influence on the distribution of these species, and also its hyperdominance on the Amazon basin, and archaeology is helping to answer this question as we are finding in lots of sites all over the Amazon basin, remains of the seeds of these species, and also all across the Holocene period. So we found some fragments of the seeds of the hard-blown tree, which is also a fruit tree considered an indicator species for anthropogenic soils, so its occurrence today on the landscape is associated to the ancient pre-Columbian sediments, and in the same way the pica tree we also identified it in the botanical record of the site. This is also a species that is associated to these anthropic soils, but it does not occur on the anthropic soils. It occurs a little away from the soils, but associated to them. So this tree produces a fruit that is also appreciated by local populations, but also by animals, so it's widely managed in the landscape today for the extraction of the fruit, but also for hunting as it can attract the game. And finally we found some moody seed fragments, and the moody seed is also a Amazonian fruit tree cultivated in several parts of the Amazon. We found some other botanical families that we could not identify the genus, like Solonaceae, Anonaceae, and Fabaceae, and this is just to show that we found on the anthropotanical record of the Solonaceae site a high richness of Amazonian native tree species and families. And so this indicates to us that the populations in this area were using lots of native fruit trees. But associated to this high diversity of fruit trees, we also found a great abundance of maize, which probably was being cultivated in this area. Maize is a species that is exotic to Amazon, it is domesticated in Mesoamerica, but entered very early in the Amazon. And for a long time in the Amazonian archaeology its cultivation was related to the needs of food of these growing populations in the in the end of the Holocene. But when we look at all this diversity of fruit trees that we found associated to the maize, we can question the role of maize cultivation in this area. And probably it was primarily related to the production of fermented beverages, as this is a very common feature of 2P speaking groups that was that were occupying this area. So how can we relate the species we found on the anthropotanical record of the Solonaceae to the landscape today? So in this site and in other archaeological sites of the region, we did some botany and ethno-botany surveys integrated to the archaeological excavation. We investigated the plant species current use and management, the distribution of the patches of the useful plant species, and also the floristic composition of the areas of the archaeological sites. So we did vegetation records. We also did interviews, participatory methods with mappings and guided tours when we walk around the forest near the excavation units to see with local specialists what were the useful species, how they occurred on the landscape. And we found that many of the species that we found on the archaeological record of the Solonaceae also occurred today on the landscape. And they are used, they are sometimes cultivated and sometimes managed, always managed by the local populations. And what is interesting is that it seems to be a pattern of occurrence of those species. Some of them always occur near the areas of entropic soils like the cacao and some palm species. And some other species always occur away from these areas, like the Brazilian tree and some other species. So these different species we see in the botanical record are associated to different ways of management and consequently to different ways of transforming the landscape. So if you look at this schema from Robert's, we have the transformation of the landscape across the time. And here in these areas of settlements we could have species like cacao, some palm species, and also maize being cultivated. And they are associated to a great transformation of the landscape, the complete transformation of the plant composition, the creation of entropic soils. But some species like the piquiá tree and the brazilian tree could be related to more subtle ways of management that could be happening in this area of the schema, where apparently nothing is happening, but with the plant management along the years it is likely to have a change in the plant composition. So just to conclude, this combination between the botanical record and other archaeological processes, the present vegetation records and most of all the local knowledge as Cava pointed on the representation is a very valuable tool to help us think and understand how the past views of some plant species in the Amazon can be related to different ways of landscape transformation and how the landscape is seen today in the forest. And that's it. Thank you.