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Although spatial thinking has long been a part of anthropological inquiry, it has waxed and waned in its perceived utility and centrality to the field. Although the papers in this volume attest to a vigorous tradition of spatial thinking in anthropology and further suggest that, for at least some branches of the field, spatial thinking and analysis are truly central to their definition and mission, it is nevertheless clear that this has not always been the case. Further, despite differences in historical trajectories of development between the two major subfields of anthropology—cultural anthropology and archaeology—in terms of the way space has been used, it is also clear that the two subfields share a number of common interests and themes that deserve discussion and exploration. This exploration is not only interesting from a purely historical perspective, but also has a very practical, down-to-earth dimension. The literature on the history of science is replete with cases of communication failures both within and between scientific disciplines. While in many cases this is merely annoying (different terms used to describe the same procedure, for instance), there are occasions when these failures lead to the creation of a highly idiosyncratic jargon used by small cliques of investigators, which clearly offers the opportunity to inhibit scholarly communication. This, in turn, can lead to redundancy of effort, failure to learn from the mistakes of others, and wasted time and money. By providing a forum in which similarities and differences can be examined, the natural tendency of scientific disciplines to form these cliques can be overcome. I intend this paper to be such a forum for an exploration of the ways in which geographic information systems (GIS) have been employed by anthropologists and archaeologists as represented by the authors of the papers presented in this volume. I will briefly describe the GIS for those readers unfamiliar with it and then turn to a review of the history of spatial thinking and the kinds of tools used to implement this thinking for each of the subdisciplines.

What is the process by which indigenous Amazonian people intensify their utilization of tropical forest resources, and what are the roles of population demography, settlement patterns, and resource degradation in this process? These are the central problems of this chapter. Over the last fifty years, ecologically oriented anthropologists have focused on these questions because of their significance for explaining the socioecological variability found among Amazonian Indians. A common theme in many attempts to account for socioecological variability in the Amazon is that large, sedentary populations necessitate increasing levels of social integration. Therefore, some explanations for this variability have sought factors that limit population density, such as the local availability of arable soils and protein-rich faunal foods. Simple single-factor frameworks have been criticized, yielding slightly more complex kinds of explanation, some based on evolutionary ecology and decision theory. Nevertheless, none of these approaches has successfully managed to relate population growth, village formation, resource degradation, and intensification of land use together in a single formalism that derives its first principles from a comparative analysis of the ethnographic literature. As a result, culture has not been assigned the central role it deserves in any theory purporting to characterize the process of land use intensification among indigenous Amazonians. This paper will review the ethnographic literature on the Amazon to (1) establish an empirical basis for the ingredients required to formulate cultural ecological theories of land-use intensification among indigenous Amazonians and (2) propose a developmental sequence based on increasing sedentism, intensification of land utilization, and growing market demand for production. Thus, this paper attempts to integrate seemingly disparate ideas from the past and present, each with some “ring of truth,” in the kind of mathematical framework advocated but never really achieved by Steward. The resulting paradigm converges on one very much resembling “land scape ecology,” but with greater emphasis on the role of culture and human decision making in a generative process. The need for detailed land-use data on a regional scale implicates the application of new technologies, such as remote sensing and geographical information systems, to test the proposed theories.