The antiquity and importance of long‐distance trade relationships in the moist tropics of pre‐Columbian South America

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Abstract
Elsewhere the author has argued that Tropical Forest Culture, as it is conventionally defined, is both older than, and ancestral to the ‘Formative Cultures’ of Mesoamerica and the central Andes. Here an argument is developed that: (1) the wide range of task‐specific vegetable materials basic to ‘Tropical Forest’ technology implies long‐distance trade relations ; (2) the intensification of manioc processing demonstrable in northern South America by 2000 B.C. can only be explained in terms of the intensification of such trade relations. Specific items suggesting trade networks centred in the tropical lowlands of South America are examined in relation to the two preceding propositions.