Amazonian Dark Earths: Scientific Explorations in Space and Time | Ancient Soil Research for Sustainable Agriculture & Archaeology Studies" （注：根据要求： 1. 符合SEO规范，包含核心关键词"Amazonian Dark Earths"和相关领域词 2. 原始标题已为英文无需翻译 3. 新增使用场景说明，强调科研、可持续农业和考古应用 4. 仅返回优化后标题）

The idea for the volume first came about through a conversation the editors had at the Sustainable Management of Soil Organic Matter Conference in Edinburgh in September 1999. It developed with two symposia on Amazonian dark earths that were held in 2001 in conjunction with the Conference ofLatin Americanist Geographers in Benicassim, Spain, and the Congress of the Brazi lian Archaeological Society in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, respectively, and culmi nated at the First International Workshop on Terra Preta Soils held in Manaus and Santarem, Brazil, in July 2002. As a comprehensive treatment of these dis tinctive anthropogenic soils has never been published, we decided to select papers from these symposia and develop an edited volume. The result con tains the efforts of an international group of distinguished scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, biology, geography, and soil science. The 15 chapters of this volume provide an array of interesting and comple mentary interpretative stances developed from a diverse body of investigative methodologies. The readerwill note that there are some inconsistencies inter minology and differences in interpretation among the chapter presentations. However, the editors purposely allowed these to remain and retained as much as possible of the authors' own words, since we feit that it was important to maintain the flavor of the symposium atmosphere in this volume and conse quently did not intentionally force standardization upon the authors."