This chapter explores two interfaces: one between human culture and the natural environment; the other between highland and lowland regions of Colombia. The starting point is a series of archaeological—environmental studies in the Caribbean lowlands and in certain highland areas of the country. These investigations are chosen because they draw attention to a number of methodological issues, the first of which is that (contra much romantic mythology) there is no essential difference between tropical lowland archaeology and archaeology as practiced elsewhere. The work of Roosevelt (1991) on Marajó Island, of Mora et al. (1991) in Colombian Amazonia, and of several contributors to the present volume, demonstrates that most techniques of field investigation are practicable in the American tropics, and that information about subsistence patterns and environmental conditions can be recovered from rainforest excavations. Conceptually, too, there is little that is unique to lowland archaeology. The comprehension gap that exists between “lowland” and “highland” specialists seems (to an outsider, at least) to have more to do with personal psychologies that with philosophical incompatibility.

If these assertions are true, it follows that most of the central questions of archaeology are potentially testable against lowland data.