South American Tropical Forest Material

South American Tropical Forest Material

Feather headdress, Amazonia. PRM 1960.9.3This brief survey is intended as a general introduction to the collections and objects* from the Native Peoples of the South American tropical forest region held by the Pitt Rivers Museum. No attempt has been made at any analysis of the material but rather this is a preliminary step to any future detailed study, as well as being an introduction to the collections.  It has been necessary to make an arbitrary decision about where the boundaries of the tropical forest lie. For example, where does the tropical forest give way to the Andean region? It may be that some readers will regard certain groups that have been included here should not have been, and vice-versa. Likewise, by restricting the survey to the tropical forest rather than lowland South America, the peoples of the Gran Chaco and Pampas are excluded.

*Although the word ‘object’ is used here and throughout, in fact the reference is to database entry which is what most researchers will use. The reason for this is that a single entry may well cover a number of objects, e.g., a basket and its lid will constitute two objects or a quiver full of blowpipe darts perhaps as many as 31 objects. It should, however, be noted that this is not always the case; there is an example of a shaman’s rattle of which each item of its contents (pebbles and seeds) has its own entry. Even so the overall result is that there are more objects than database entries. In the case of South America the database has 8,574 entries covering 10,330 objects.

One of the difficulties in preparing this survey has been deciding on the mode of presentation. Three possibilities were considered. The first, which was by collector, was quickly dismissed because, whereas there are a few major collectors, the great majority of collectors are associated with very few items or the identity of the collector is unknown. The second possibility was to present it by ethnic group. This form had much in its favour as it reflected the native reality, but once again the ethnic provenance of many objects is unknown.

The third way was by country. Although there are exceptions, in the majority of cases there is
no doubt about which modern South American country any particular object came from; accordingly that is the scheme selected to order this survey. Even so and as will be obvious, this has its drawbacks. The most serious of these is the fact that ethnic groups are not restricted to national territories but overlap frontiers. Where the bulk of a collection comes from one country and fewer items from the neighbouring territory, the latter have been included with the former.

The bulk of the collection is of an ethnographic nature. There is very little archaeological material which, not surprisingly, dominates the collections from the Andean and Pacific coastal regions. It should be mentioned, however, that this is not a genuine reflection of the tropical forest situation since there are museums, such as the Goeldi Museum in Belém do Pará, that hold collections of magnificent ceramics that should undoubtedly be classed as archaeological finds. The collections surveyed here are on the whole dominated by the following objects: hunting weapons, that is bows and arrows, blowpipes and their darts, and associated accessories; basketry objects which include as huge range of domestic objects including all those used in the processing of cassava, the staple crop through much of the region; musical instruments, particularly flutes; and feather ornaments, including elaborate headdresses and armbands. Also featuring strongly are pottery items, hammocks, clubs, and women’s bead or seed aprons. There are as well a number of more esoteric items such as shaman’s rattles and shrunken heads.

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Tropical Africa

Although tropical Africa is most familiar in the West as depicted by its rain forests, this region of Africa is far more diverse. While the tropics are thought of as regions with warm to hot moist climates caused by latitude and the tropical rain belt, the geology of areas, particularly mountain chains, and geographical relation to continental and regional scale winds impact the[citation needed] overall parts of areas, also, making the tropics run from arid to humid in West Africa.[edit] Tropic rain forests are tropical moist forests of semi-deciduous varieties distributed across nine West African countries. Institute for Sea Research conducted a temperature record dating back to 700, 000 years ago.[1] Several conservation and development demographic settings are such that the most loss of rain forests has occurred in countries of higher population growth. Lack of dependable data and survey information in some countries has made the account of areas of unbroken forest and/or under land use change and their relation to economic indicators difficult to ascertain. Hence, the amount and rate of deforestation in Africa are less known than other regions of tropics.. The term deforestation refers to the complete obstruction of forest canopy cover for means of agriculture, plantations, cattle-ranching, and other non-forest fields. Other forest use changes for example are forest disintegration (changing the spatial continuity and creating a mosaic of forest blocks and other land cover types), and dreadful conditions (selective logging of woody species for profitable purposes that affects the forest subfloor and the biodiversity).[1] The general meaning to the term deforestation is linked not only to the value system but the type of measurement designed to assess it. Thus, the same interpretations of deforestation cause noticeable changes in the estimate of forests cleared. One reason for forest depletion is to grap cash crops. None West African countries depend on cash crop exports. Products like gum, copal, rubber, cola nuts, and palm oil provide rather steady income revenue for the West African countries. Land use change spoils entire habitats with the forests. Converting forests into timber is another cause of deforestation. Over decades, the primary forest product was commercial timber. Urbanized countries account for a great percentage of the world's wood consumption, that increased greatly between 1950 and 1980. Simultaneously, preservation measures were reinforced to protect European and American forests.[1]Economic growth and growing environmental protection in industrialized European countries made request for tropical hardwood become strong in West Africa. In the first half of the 1980s, an annual forest loss of 7,200 square kilometers was note down along the Gulf of Guinea, a figure equivalent to 4-5 percent of the total remaining rain forest area.[1] By 1985, 72 percent of West Africa's rainforests had been transformed into fallow lands and an additional 9 percent had been opened up by timber exploitation.[1] Tropical timber became a viable choice to European wood following World War II, as trade with East European countries stop and timber noticeably became sparse in western and southern Europe. Despite efforts to promote lesser known timber species use, the market continued to focus on part of the usable timber obtainable. West Africa was prone to selective harvesting practices; while conservationists blamed the timber industry and the farmers for felling trees, others believe rain forest destruction is connected to the problem of fuel wood.[1] The contribution of fuel wood consumption to tree stock decline in Africa is believed to be significant. It is generally believed that firewood provides 75 per cent of the energy used in sub-Sahara Africa.[1] With the high demand, the consumption of wood for fuel exceeds the renewal of forest cover. The rain forests which remain in West Africa now merely are how they were hardly 30 years ago. In Guinea, Liberia and the Ivory Coast, there is almost no primary forest cover left unscathed; in Ghana the situation is much worse, and nearly all the rain forest are cut down. Guinea-Bissau loses 200 to 350 km² of forest yearly, Senegal 500 km² of wooded savanna, and Nigeria 6,000,050,000 of both. Liberia exploits 800 km² of forests each year. Extrapolating from present rates of loss, botanist Peter Raven pictures that the majority of the world's moderate and smaller rain forests (such as in Africa,) could be ruined in forty years. Tropical Africa is about 18% of the world total covering 20 million km² of land in West and Central Africa.[1] The region has been facing deforestation in various degrees of intensity throughout the recent decades. The actual rate of deforestation varies from one country to another and accurate data does not exist yet. Recent estimates show that the annual pace of deforestation in the region can vary from 150 km² in Gabon to 2900 km² in Cote d'Ivoire. Remaining tropical forest still cover major areas in Central Africa but are abridged by patches in West Africa. The African Timber Organization member countries (ATO) eventually recognized the cooperation between rural people and their forest environment. Customary law gives residents the right to use trees for firewood, fell trees for construction, and collect of forest products and rights for hunting or fishing and grazing or clearing of forests for maintenance agriculture. Other areas are called "protected forests", which means that uncontrolled clearings and unauthorized logging are forbidden. After World War II, commercial exploitation increased until no West African forestry department was able of making the law. By comparison with rain forests in other places of the world in 1973, Africa showed the greatest infringement though in total volume means, African timber production accounted just one third compared to that of Asia.[1] The difference was due to the variety of trees in Africa forests and the demand for specific wood types in Europe. Forestry regulations in east Africa were first applied by colonial governments, but they were not strict enough to fill forest exploitation. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the inadequate performance of forest regulations was recognized. The Tropical Forestry Action Plan was conceived in 1987 by the World Resources Institute in cooperation with the Food and Agriculture Organization, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the World Bank with hopes of halting tropical forest destruction.[1] In its bid to stress forest conservation and development, the World Bank provided $111,103 million in building countries, especially in Africa, to help in developing long range forest conservation and management programs meant for ending deforestation.

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Tropical Asia

Through a crop-based biodiversity, natural resources and animals (birds, fruits, and forests), Tropical Asia is economically and physiogeographically rich. There are 16 countries of Tropical Asia ranging in size from around 610 km² (Singapore) to 3,000,000 km² (India).^[2] Its population, is dominantly rural—however, in 1995, a census showed that a region with 6 out of 25 of the large cities . The population is 1.6 billion, likely to reach 2.4 billion in 2025.^[1][2] Climate in Tropical Asia is subject to seasonal weather patterns with the two monsoons and the amount of tropical cyclones in the three core areas ofcyclogenesis (the Bay of Bengal, north Pacific Ocean and South China Sea). The climate varies over several environmental factors such as: growing urbanization, land industrialization and economic development or the opposite land degradation, environmental issues, and increased pollution.

In Tropical Asia, momentous elevational lifts on the ecosystems on the mountains show change in distribution and behavior of the rainforest. In Thailand, for instance, the area of tropical forests could increase from 45% to 80% of the total forest cover, while in Sri Lanka, a substantial change in dry forest and decrease in wet forest might occur.^[1][2] With predictable increases in evapotranspiration and rainfall changeability, likely a negative impact on the viability of freshwater wetlands will occur, resulting in contraction and desiccation. Sea level and temperature rises are the most likely major climate change-related stresses on ecosystems.^[1][2] Coral reefs might be capable of surviving this intensification, but suffer bleaching from high temperatures. Landward migration of mangroves and tidal wetlands is likely to be inhibited by human infrastructure and human activities.

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