Peru specialist Dr. Inge Schjellerup, an anthropologist and archaeologist associated with the National Museum of Denmark, stumbled upon the isolated Huambo Valley on the eastern slope of the Andes mountains during field research in 1997. She was surprised to see widespread deforestation and human settlement in a zone that was supposed to be uninhabited according to the official map of Peru. Schjellerup launched an interdisciplinary study of this forgotten region with a team of archaeologists, anthropologists, botanists and geographers. The result of this work, The Forgotten Valleys, explores the effects of land use on the environment of the Huambo Valley over the past 500 years. Schjellerup's team discovered extreme biological diversity in the area, but the forests are under such accelerated destruction that some unknown species are possibly in danger of disappearing before they have even been discovered. Despite an increasing awareness of the need for preserving cultural and biological diversity in the montane forests, very few efforts have focused on a historical, diachronic aspect. The Forgotten Valleys thus explores how humans have gradually changed the environment in this region and how environmental change has thus revised human activities through time.

Text in English & Spanish. This book on the Chilchos Valley in the northeastern slopes of the Andes in Peru attempts to understand how human activities have changed the landscape in the montane forests during the last 500 years. Settlements and terraces from the Chachapoya and Inca cultures in the Ceja de Selva (high jungle) witness of an ample use in pre-Hispanic times. Later after a drastic declination of the population in the colonial period the Chilchos Valley was forgotten in hundreds of years and then rediscovered and revisited in 1900. Within the stage of rediscovering the valley, new socio-cultural processes of adaptation to the environment began with migrations from the Sierra. This book includes archaeological, historical, sociological and botanical studies of a corner of Peru, which has hitherto not been given much scientific attention.