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...The secret, say the theory's proponents, is in the ground beneath their feet. The highly fertile soil called terra preta do indio, Portuguese for Indian black earth, was either intentionally created by these pre-Columbian people or is the accidental byproduct of their presence...

...On some of the sites, several square miles of earth are packed with millions of potsherds. The archeologists also cite evidence of giant plazas, bridges and roads, complete with curbs, and defensive ditches that would have taken armies of workers to construct.

The earliest signs of large, sedentary populations appear to coincide with the beginnings of terra preta. ''Something happened 2,500 years ago, and we don't know what," said Eduardo Neves, a Brazilian archeologist...

...The research into terra preta fuels a ''revisionist school" of scientists who argue that the pre-Columbian Amazon was not a pristine wilderness, but a heavily managed forest teeming with human beings. They theorize that advanced societies existed in the region from before the time of Christ until a century after the European conquest in the 1500s decimated Amerindian populations through exploitation and disease. The theory also is supported by the accounts of the first Europeans to travel the length of the Amazon River in 1542. They reported human settlements with thousands of people stretching for many miles along the river banks.

But not everyone working in Amazonian research buys the new theory....

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But not everyone working in Amazonian research buys the new theory...

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The Atlantic Monthly | March 2002

1491

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact

by Charles C. Mann

.....

he plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. Then they, too, disappeared. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.

Below us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Interviews: "The Pristine Myth" (March 7, 2002)
Charles C. Mann talks about the thriving and sophisticated Indian landscape of the pre-Columbus Americas Clark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania; he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. Balée is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.

Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. My son picked up the same ideas at his schools. One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion this picture of Indian life is wrong in almost every aspect. Indians were here far longer than previously thought, these researchers believe, and in much greater numbers. And they were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughly dominated by humankind.

Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial. To begin with, some researchers—many but not all from an older generation—deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. "I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni," says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. "Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking." Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Indians, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University. The problem is that "you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want," he says. "It's really easy to kid yourself."

More important are the implications of the new theories for today's ecological battles. Much of the environmental movement is animated, consciously or not, by what William Denevan, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin, calls, polemically, "the pristine myth"—the belief that the Americas in 1491 were an almost unmarked, even Edenic land, "untrammeled by man," in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the nation's first and most important environmental laws. As the University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon has written, restoring this long-ago, putatively natural state is, in the view of environmentalists, a task that society is morally bound to undertake. Yet if the new view is correct and the work of humankind was pervasive, where does that leave efforts to restore nature?

The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of earthen fish weirs between the causeways. To keep the habitat clear of unwanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas on fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle. When we flew over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees—many of them, one assumes, of the varieties that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.

After we landed, I asked Balée, Should we let people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millennia?

Balée laughed. "You're trying to trap me, aren't you?" he said.

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Try reading the linked article.

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I did. I googled Betty Meggers and came up with a fair bit of stuff. She definitely seems like the genuine article.

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There are few people who have impacted the field of archaeology as fiercely as Dr. Betty Meggers. Her persistence, ingenuity, and great archaeological skills have earned her the respect of many colleagues, scholars, and students. She has broken many boundaries and helped pave the way for women in the field of archaeology...

...During the thirties, forties, and fifties, the germination period of Meggers' career, these prejudices were extremely solid barriers for women who were more than qualified to work alongside esteemed male archaeologists. Dr. Meggers was one of the first to overcome these obstacles; she triumphed over all those who discouraged her merely because of her sex, and proved to the world that the field of archaeology could learn much from women...

...There are numerous sources of information about Dr. Meggers; her name is easy to find on the internet, and she has written quite a few books on her research. In one of her books, entitled Amazonia, Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, Dr. Meggers uses an ecological approach to demonstrate how the civilizations of the Amazon have learned to cope with an environment with scarce human resources. The book is based on research she accumulated over a period of twenty years spent in the Amazon Basin.

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What she was quoted as saying in the Star article was:

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''The idea that the indigenous population has secrets that we don't know about is not supported by anything except wishful thinking and the myth of El Dorado," said archeologist Betty J. Meggers, who is the main defender of the idea that only small, tribal societies ever inhabited the Amazon. ''This myth just keeps going on and on and on. It's amazing."

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Most of Egyptology still suffers because early Egyptologists were stuck on the Biblical age of the earth; thus it it is not possible for the syphinx to be more than 6000 years old in spite of the water erosion which any geologist would date to over 12,000 years ago.

'Counterfeit Paradise' is written from a cultural ecology point of view, a term adopted to describe a semi-Marxist/materialist theoretical standpoint wherein the physical environment is held to be the determining factor in social organization. It's an old theoretical standpoint, not to say discredited, but definitely past its prime. Meggers' argument rests on IMO, a tripod consisting of:

- The absence of major (read: large) archaeological sites with one exception at the mouth of the Amazon
- The poverty of Amazonian soils for agriculture once you get away from the flood plain (largely ignoring the terra preta)
- The presence less complex contemporary indigenous groups (while dismissing the accuracy of the historical documentation of large settlements)

Now, Dr. Meggers has built her academic reputation on this point of view, so like many academics she'll probably defend it to the death. But, it would seem that evidence is mounting that undermines all three of those tripod legs.

So the working assumption from the beginning was that Amazonia couldn't have complex societies, because the archaeological record doesn't look like that of the Andes, where we 'know' there were complex societies because they were intelligible to Europeans as such at the time of contact. That's a fairly hefty assumption, based largely on us trusting nice, decent people like Pizarro and Cortez to have accurately described the cultures they were encountering.

Evidence is cropping up all over the Americas pointing to the various First Nations both exercising substantial control over, and having wide-reaching impacts on, their environments. It would seem that this is what humans do, no matter where they live.

I suspect we're going to start finding out that a major factor conditioning all this conventional wisdom about who was complex and who wasn't, is largely built on which societies were easily understandable to European explorers, and which ones weren't. If you've got towns, fortifications, engage in set-piece warfare with your neighbours, that makes sense to a European observer circa 1600, so they respect you. If you don't do things 'the European way', or at least in a way intelligible to Europeans, then you don't get the same respect from them.

(NB, using 'respect' in a broad sense--the Inca and Aztecs still got slaughtered)

added: Potted description of the debate as it stands

[ 16 January 2005: Message edited by: aRoused ]

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Um, with all due respect to Dr. Meggers, who *is* a very well-known and respected archaeologist, the fact that a famous archaeologist says it don't necessarily make it so.

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Quite true. However she did do twenty years in the Amazon Basin studying the remnants of civilizations.

It's not the 'respect' that makes her statement true, it's the twenty years of on site study that makes for the 'respect'.

I also googled the Central Amazon Project, and the names of the participants. For something that is seemingly so important there sure weren't much info.

The other thing that makes me wonder is this reference to 'terra preta'. The article makes it seem as though this is some special earth created by a former civilization, allowing them to live in a way that was otherwise impossible.

But what is so special about terra preta. The article doesn't say.

I suspect what it is is river delta soil with the addition of ash from the burning of vegetation. That is common to people all over the world.

They still do that in this country quite commonly. Doesn't sound much like some miracle thing.

In any case, I'm going to keep trying to get info on the Central Amazon Project to see if there is something there.

There is no formal Central Amazon Project, that's just what the researchers working on it are calling themselves. Similarly, I've given my research a 'Project' title, but as I'm still just a student and not in receipt of any serious funding, it's just a little hubris on my part (but also preparation for post-doctoral work when I can hopefully extend it into a 'real' Project).

Here's an article on the subject from Science that's a lot less sensationalized, and lays out the claims/counterclaims of Meggers and Heckenberger/Petersen/Neves. In particular:

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Basing their conclusions on their archaeological studies at Marajó, a huge island at the mouth of the Amazon, Meggers and Evans concluded that Amazonia is a "counterfeit paradise"--a region with such intractably poor soils that it cannot long provide the agricultural base they argued was necessary to support materially advanced cultures.

The arguments by Meggers and Evans cast such a large shadow that for decades after their publication few archaeologists explored the main Amazon. "Why would you look when you know ahead of time that you're going to find nothing?" asks Eduardo Góes Neves, an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo. "So for almost an entire generation almost nobody in archaeology came to even the most obvious places in the basin."

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I'm perhaps extra sympathetic to the new evidence because my own area of research got similarly overshadowed by a 'big name' who strenuously put forward a particular viewpoint.

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Ultimately they excavated four sites intensively and explored another 30, all near the junction of the Amazon and the Rio Negro. On the evidence of carbon-dated ceramics, they argue that Açutuba was inhabited in two waves, from about 360 B.C., when terra preta formation began, to as late as A.D. 1440. Note that date: other groups, for example on the Northwest Coast, also been mistakenly interpreted based on changes that were occurring exactly at the point of European contact -- aRoused (...) After the Central Amazon Project published its initial findings, Meggers sharply attacked them last fall in the journal Latin American Antiquity. Charging that the team members had ignored data from long-term, Smithsonian-backed surveys, she argued that they had confused multiple small reoccupations of the same site with continuous large occupation. The Central Amazon Project replied that the (Smithsonian) surveys, many of which remain unpublished, mainly involved "brief episodes of fieldwork at small samples ... along vast stretches of major rivers," not the detailed work they had performed.

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Bio of Betty J. Meggers

James Petersen home page

aRoused, thanks for your links; very interesting [tho some require registration].

I think this whole area of research has wider implications; the argument on just how much human beings have affected their environment and climate, whether by intent or by accident. Ronald Wright's recent talks on human effects on the environment were good, but not a new idea; I wrote a paper on such things for a biology course some 15 years ago, relying on publications also dealing with these issues; things such as the Harrappan civilization cutting down all their trees and changing the climate from a rainforest to a desert [I'm vague on the details now].

The thing is, the idea that people were able to build up the rain forest [or is that an exageration?] is a sign that we can have a more positive effect under the right conditions. Would it be possible to do the same elsewhere?

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...In an effort to figure out the formula, Brazilian researchers added carbon to soil to see if it would stimulate growth, but they had no success. Then they tried just adding fertilizer, and still had no luck. But when they added carbon and fertilizer together, they saw an astonishing 880 percent increase in the growth of the rice and sorghum planted in the test plot...

...The rich soils that have persisted to this day most likely came about by accident.

Petersen thinks those fertile plots are probably yesterday's garbage pits. Stir in a little charcoal, toss in the remains of fish harvested from the rivers, and over the years the dirt became better than gold.

While they may not have done all that on purpose, once the soil was there, it probably stimulated the growth of villages into cities, Petersen says. And that added more garbage, and more plots of enriched soil...

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But this is always presented as a one way street. It is never suggested that the Europeans contracted diseases from the Westerners (I'll call all New World civilizations that for lack of a better inclusive term).

Now how could that be? Did the westerners not have diseases? Were the Europeans somehow not susceptible?

After all, medicine was certainly in no better state in Europe at the time than it was anywhere else.

I wonder if it's possible that the 'disease' hypothesis is presented in the hopes that we won't investigate to closely how many people were just killed.

In a book by Stephen Jay Gould I just finished (Leonardo's Mountain Of Clams and The Diet Of Worms), one of the essays detailed how all of the inhabitants of the Bahamas were killed within 15 years of the landing of Columbus.

Gould quoted Columbus's diary, showing Columbus commenting on the fact that the Bahamians had no weapons, and no iron. Columbus pointed out that as few as fifty of his men, with the advantage of iron, could control the whole population.

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Originally posted by maestro:
But this is always presented as a one way street. It is never suggested that the Europeans contracted diseases from the Westerners . . . .

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More recently, diseases such as tuberculosis were common among aboriginal people in Canada, but that I think is a result of poverty rather than a lack of immunity.

Years ago I took a history course on Africa and learned that it was quite deadly to Europeans, with malaria and other diseases, and parasites I think; so Europeans did not go in there in large numbers as early as they might have if it had been more hospitable.

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Years ago I took a history course on Africa and learned that it was quite deadly to Europeans, with malaria and other diseases, and parasites . . .

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Without massive ramparts, pyramids or towers, anthropologists can't concieve that there were civilized peoples.

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Ouch. Um, not (generally) true? I'm sure we can find some archaeologist/anthropologist today who still thinks that way, but that's in no way indicative of the majority.

Syphilis is not exactly contagious.

In any case, no populations of Europeans were wiped out by any disease coming from the new world.

I'll see if it is in the local library...