Precolonial societies in Brazil’s Cerrado—a vast tropical savanna—have long posed a puzzle: did people survive mainly through mobile hunting and gathering, or through intensive, settled maize farming? A new study in Science Advances delivers large-scale, direct evidence that shifts the debate toward a more complex reality of how food systems were organized.
Using stable isotope measurements, researchers traced what people ate across the Late Holocene. They analyzed carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen isotope ratios preserved in human teeth and bone collagen from more than 100 individuals recovered at 37 archaeological sites spanning the Cerrado, Caatinga, and Atlantic Forest biomes.
To build a tightly dated dietary timeline, the team combined isotope data with freshly generated radiocarbon dates from human bone collagen, faunal isotope baselines, archaeobotanical indicators, and palaeoecological records. This multi-proxy approach allowed them to separate dietary signal from environmental background and to compare contemporaneous communities living in broadly similar regions.
The isotopic patterns reveal a striking geographic and cultural split. Populations associated with open-air villages obtained a substantial share of their diets from maize, while groups living in nearby rock shelters consumed markedly more diverse foods and showed little evidence of intensive maize reliance.
Because the two settings overlapped ecologically, the researchers argue that the dietary differences cannot be explained by climate or local resource availability alone. Instead, the contrast points to distinct cultural traditions and economic strategies operating side by side across the landscape.
Crucially, the maize-centered communities did not appear to practice monoculture at an intensive scale. Rather than replacing wild and domesticated diversity, they developed maize-based polyculture systems designed to sustain large villages while maintaining a broad spectrum of cultivated and gathered resources.
“These results challenge broader ideas about how agriculture developed in tropical South America,” the study’s findings suggest, aligning maize cultivation with resilient, diversified production strategies. The work emphasizes how domesticated crops, wild plants, and local ecological knowledge were integrated to buffer communities against ecological variability.
With this evidence, the Cerrado emerges alongside the Amazon as a major center for understanding Indigenous innovation before European colonization. The research also reframes long-term human influence on one of the world’s most biodiverse tropical savannas, highlighting how sustainable land-use practices can shape ecosystems over centuries.
Subject of Research: Precolonial subsistence strategies and maize-based food production in the Brazilian Cerrado
Article Title: Maize-based polyculture, not monoculture, sustained pre-colonial societies in the Brazilian Cerrado
News Publication Date: 15-Jul-2026
Web References: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aef7066
References: 10.1126/sciadv.aef7066
Image Credits: Mariane Pereira Ferreira
Keywords: stable isotopes, maize, polyculture, archaeology, radiocarbon dating, Indigenous food systems, Cerrado, diet reconstruction, tropical savannas
