Amazonia is home to a number of Amerindian groups who make a living by some combination of swidden horticulture, hunting, fishing and foraging. These populations have been disappearing at a rapid rate since the turn of the century as areas of forest and cerrado have been developed (Ribeiro, 1967), but there are still a number of Amerindian groups that are self-sufficient, or almost self sufficient, in food production, and have diets that appear to be traditional. The purpose of this paper is to review what is known of the diet and nutritional status of these groups.
Ideally we would like to be able to define Amerindian diets in terms of ecological variables, the characteristics of food resources, patterns of food selection and use, and the implications that these have for dietary adequacy, nutritional status and health. We would also like to understand how these change with contact and assimilation into Western society. However, much of what is known about diet in Amazonia is anecdotal. This kind of information is useful in providing a preliminary description of the diet, but provides little on which to judge the adequacy of the diet or potential nutritional problems. There is somewhat better information available on nutritional status, especially anthropometric indicators of nutritional status, but the interpretation of these indices is not straight forward because they are sensitive to a variety of environmental variables, as well as diet.
Amazonia is used here following Denevan (1976) to include the area of South America east of the Andes and north of the Tropic of Capricorn. It thus includes all of the tropical lowlands and interior plateaus east of the Andes. Climatically most of the area is warm and relatively humid. Rainfall is highest in the western portion around the equator. In this area rainfall is between 2500 and 3500 mm/yr with no month receiving less than 100 mm. There is no real "dry" season, but there is typically a period of 2-3 months of relatively low rainfall. Moving east rainfall decreases to 1000 - 2000 mm/yr and becomes more seasonal. In Central Brazil there is a dry season of 3-4 months (Prance, 1978).
For descriptive purposes it is useful to divide Amazonia into three regions: northern, western and southern peripheral Amazonia. These distinctions conform to Fittkau's ecological subregions (Herrera et al., 1978). A fourth region, central Amazonia, which includes the floodplain of the Amazon River itself, is not considered here since its inhabitants were not known ethnographically.
The Amerindian groups for which there is some information on diet are described below. At the time they were observed almost all had subsistence systems based on swidden horticulture, hunting, fishing and gathering, and except for the Xavánte, inhabited tropical forest environments. The dates during which they were observed are only a rough guide to their degree of acculturation, since contact and assimilation have proceeded at very different paces in different parts of Amazonia.
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