Contours of the Past: LiDAR Data Expands the Limits of Late Pre-Columbian Human Settlement in the Santarém Region,Lower Amazon

Recent studies have shown that pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon undertook significant landscape modifications, including earthworks. Our fieldwork has revealed that pre-Columbian settlements in the Santarém Region, Lower Amazon, were not limited to the vicinities of permanent water courses, as formerly often assumed. Instead, numerous archaeological sites, dating from ca. a.d. 1300 up to the time of European colonization in the seventeenth century, have been found in an upland area known as the Belterra Plateau, south of the present-day city of Santarém. These upland sites have been found to be associated with particular features in the landscape: cavities or depressions, known locally as “Poços de Água”. LiDAR data shows that a pattern of non-randomly distributed depressions extends far into the densely forested Tapajós National Forest (Flona-Tapajós), allowing us to suggest that the expansion of inland settlement extended considerably farther to the south than what has previously been established through conventional archaeological fieldwork.     

Intervention methods in land disputes

Archival data, survey and interviews were used to investigate mediation activities among judges in the Norwegian Land Consolidation Court. The court handles land issue disputes among farmers in rural Norway. Despite having both planning skill and court power the judges spend a considerable amount of time mediating the disputes. In fairly integrative planning disputes they increase their mediation efforts with conflict level, case size and complexity. Mediation helped to reduce objections to the plan implemented. In more distributive boundary disputes they mediated less, and to a lesser degree varied efforts with case characteristics. However, settlements were achieved in the less conflictive, smaller and less complex cases. Considerable variations in mediation styles were found among the judges. Those with settlement oriented behaviour achieved more settlements than those that focused on facilitating communication. Implications are discussed.