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[ES] La pregunta de quién fue el cirujano sevillano Pedro López de León y qué significó el manual de medicina y cirugía que escribió en Cartagena de Indias a comienzos del siglo XVII, es el objetivo central que persigue nuestro trabajo. A través de la re-construcción de su vida, de las reflexiones en torno a su obra y de un análisis de los referentes bibliográficos que usó, resaltaremos la notoriedad trasatlántica que alcanzó en el esfuerzo por desarrollar el conocimiento científico de la medicina moderna en un puerto central del Caribe en el comercio Atlántico en la Edad Moderna. [EN] The focus of this work is surgeon Pedro López de León and the contribution of his manual of medicine and surgery, which he wrote in Cartagena de Indias in the early seventeenth century. Through the reconstruction of his life, and the analysis of his work and bibliographical references, we highlight the transatlantic notoriety of the effort to develop the scientific knowledge of modern medicine in a central port of the Caribbean in the Atlantic Trade. Esta investigación forma parte del Proyecto Connected Worlds: The Caribbean, Origin of Modern World”. This project has received funding from the European Union ́s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement Nº 823846. Dirigido por Consuelo Naranjo Orovio desde el Instituto de Historia-CSIC. Peer reviewed

Moving back in time from the early colonial to the late pre-colonial period we evaluate the hypothesis asserting the migratory movement of Cariban-speaking groups from the Middle Orinoco River area towards north-central Venezuela. The explanation in vogue maintains that the migration followed fluvial routes and occurred between 1350 and 1150 BP (AD 600–800). We examine archaeological, linguistic, ethnohistorical, genetic, and ecological data seeking similarities between the Orinoco emigrants and their north-central Venezuelan descendants. As a result, we propose an alternative terrestrial/fluvial route and suggest these events occurred between 1150 and 1050 BP (AD 800–900). The route first proceeded upstream along rivers of the central llanos and later followed a natural terrestrial geomorphological corridor into the Lake Valencia Basin. We argue that, while future interdisciplinary (especially archaeo-linguistic and bioarchaeological) research is needed to further assess the results of these analyses, the Orinocan descendants in north-central Venezuela emerge as one of the most dynamic sociopolitical Cariban-speaking entities in all northeastern South America and the insular Caribbean on the eve of the European Conquest.

The marks of prehistoric human societies on tropical forests can still be detected today. Levis et al. performed a basin-wide comparison of plant distributions, archaeological sites, and environmental data. Plants domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples are much more likely to be dominant in Amazonian forests than other species. Furthermore, forests close to archaeological sites often have a higher abundance and richness of domesticated species. Thus, modern-day Amazonian tree communities across the basin remain largely structured by historical human use.Science, this issue p. 925The extent to which pre-Columbian societies altered Amazonian landscapes is hotly debated. We performed a basin-wide analysis of pre-Columbian impacts on Amazonian forests by overlaying known archaeological sites in Amazonia with the distributions and abundances of 85 woody species domesticated by pre-Columbian peoples. Domesticated species are five times more likely than nondomesticated species to be hyperdominant. Across the basin, the relative abundance and richness of domesticated species increase in forests on and around archaeological sites. In southwestern and eastern Amazonia, distance to archaeological sites strongly influences the relative abundance and richness of domesticated species. Our analyses indicate that modern tree communities in Amazonia are structured to an important extent by a long history of plant domestication by Amazonian peoples. International audience

In the decades of the 1620s and 1630s the Dutch engaged in salt extraction on the island of La Tortuga, Venezuela, erecting a wooden fort, portable cannon emplacements, jetties and semi-industrial solar saltpan production facilities. The relative paucity of the archaeological record juxtaposed with the wealth of detailed documentary data and fieldwork experiences led to the operationalization of the heuristic tool of ‘scapes’. A critical construction of these socially alive portions of the island landscape and seascape demonstrates 1) how north-western European conceptions of the cultural control of nature were embodied in Dutch orderliness and industriousness; 2) how the strategy of maximization of extractive practices and minimization of risk was evidenced in the overall ephemerality of structures; and 3) how these structural imperatives were imbricated in the prose of human life and death that was unfolding from one small-scale event to another on this desolate island. This research has received funding from European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–13) ERC Grant agreement no. 319209, under the direction of Prof. Dr C. L. Hofman.