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Widespread Amazonian dark earth in the Xingu Indigenous Territory

Nature Sustainability volume 7, pages 1304–1312 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

Amazonian dark earth (ADE) is highly nutrient- and carbon-rich soil created by past inhabitants of the Amazon. It would be valuable to know the extent of ADE because of its cultural and environmental importance, but systematic efforts to map its distribution and extent are impractical with traditional field methods. We use remote-sensing imagery and a machine-learning classifier with ground-truthed training data to predict the occurrence of ADE across the 26,000 km2 Território Indígena do Xingu (TIX) in the southeastern Amazon region of Brazil. We find widespread ADE across the TIX, well beyond previously studied archaeological sites, occupying at least 3–4% of the land area. We further estimate that the TIX may sequester 9 Mt of carbon within ADE deposits from past human inputs. Our findings show that ancient inhabitants of the TIX substantially modified their environment, highlighting the importance of conserving this natural and cultural resource given threats from climate change and deforestation.

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Fig. 1: ADE.
Fig. 2: TIX, Mato Grosso, Brazil.
Fig. 3: Training data.
Fig. 4: Classification maps from random-forest classifier.
Fig. 5: Comparison of the two classification maps.

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Data availability

AIKAX owns the intellectual property rights (copyright) to all digital data, images and maps created or extrapolated from this project. These data are housed in the AIKAX-maintained ArcGIS Portal, for which there are established protocols for data sharing and collaboration. Requests for access should be made to mheck@ufl.edu.

Code availability

The Google Earth Engine script for image processing and classification is available via Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11039509) (ref. 49).

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Acknowledgements

Collaborative field research in the TIX was authorized by the Associação Indígena Kuikuro do Alto Xingu (AIKAX) for NSF Archaeology grants sponsored by the University of Florida from 2002 to 2021 (NSF BCS#0004487, 0353129, 1660459) (M.H.) in collaboration with Brazilian institutional sponsors, the Museu Nacional, Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and Universidade de São Paulo. Authorizations were awarded to these institutions for the NSF-sponsored research from the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Tecnologia (CNPq), the Fundação Nacional do Índio (FUNAI), Instituto de Patrimônio Histórico e Artística Nacional (IPHAN), Conselho de Ética (CONEP) and Conselho Nacional de Arqueologia (CNA) in Brazil. Additional support was provided by the University of Florida, the Wenner–Gren Foundation and the São Paulo Research Foundation (grant 2017/25157-0 to J.W.), conducted under the auspices of the authorized NSF-sponsored project. The AIKAX Geospatial Portal is supported by the William Talbott Hillman Foundation, the Pennywise Foundation and Puente Institute. In addition to co-authors on this paper, the Kuikuro community at large is gratefully acknowledged, including contributions as paid assistants by over three dozen community members over the past 30 years. The remote-sensing analyses presented in this paper are based specifically on work conducted at MIT by S.L.G., M.J.S., J.D.H. and J.T.P., supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Earth and Space Science Fellowship under grant no. 80NSSC18K1324 (S.L.G.) and the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J.T.P.). Research at MIT was also sponsored by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the Department of the Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number FA8750-19-2-1000 (J.T.P.). The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Department of the Air Force or the US Government. The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation herein.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Marine Geosciences, Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA

    Samuel L. Goldberg

  2. Frost Institute for Data Science and Computing, University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA

    Samuel L. Goldberg

  3. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Samuel L. Goldberg, Morgan J. Schmidt, Joshua D. Himmelstein & J. Taylor Perron

  4. Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Morgan J. Schmidt & J. Taylor Perron

  5. Department of Anthropology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

    Morgan J. Schmidt & Michael Heckenberger

  6. Laboratório de Estudos Interdisciplinares em Arqueologia, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianopolis, Brazil

    Morgan J. Schmidt

  7. Institute of Marine Sciences, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Joshua D. Himmelstein

  8. Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

    Bruna Franchetto & Carlos Fausto

  9. Museu Paraense Emilio Goeldi, Belém, Brazil

    Helena Lima

  10. Museu de Arqueologia e Etnologia, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

    Jennifer Watling

  11. Puente Institute, Nederland, CO, USA

    Bruno Moraes & Wetherbee B. Dorshow

  12. Earth Analytic Inc., Santa Fe, NM, USA

    Bruno Moraes & Wetherbee B. Dorshow

  13. Department of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Wetherbee B. Dorshow

  14. Associação Indígena do Alto Xingu (AIKAX), Gaucha do Norte, Brazil

    Kumessi Waura, Huke Kuikuro, Taku Wate Kuikuro & Afukaka Kuikuro

Authors
  1. Samuel L. Goldberg
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Contributions

S.L.G. performed image classification and analysis. S.L.G., M.J.S., M.H. and J.T.P. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors. S.L.G. and M.J.S. curated training data. S.L.G. and J.D.H. developed the code for image processing and classification. M.J.S., M.H., B.F., H.L., J.W., B.M., W.B.D., C.F., K.W., H.K. and T.W.K. contributed field mapping used in the creation of training data. M.H. directed NSF-sponsored archaeological research in the TIX. B.F. and M.H. acquired the necessary permits for research in Brazil. A.K. facilitated and provided oversight of field research in the Kuikuro village in the TIX.

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Correspondence to Samuel L. Goldberg.

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Nature Sustainability thanks Michael Palace, Alessandro Samuel-Rosa and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Goldberg, S.L., Schmidt, M.J., Himmelstein, J.D. et al. Widespread Amazonian dark earth in the Xingu Indigenous Territory. Nat Sustain 7, 1304–1312 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-024-01399-3

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