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Human Settlement in the Amazon - R.Butler
The Amazon has a long history of human settlement. Contrary to popular belief, sizeable and sedentary societies of great complexity existed in the Amazon rainforest. These societies produced pottery, cleared sections of rainforest for agriculture, and managed forests to optimize the distribution of useful species. The notion of a virgin Amazon is largely the result of the population crash following the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. Studies suggest that 11.8% of the Amazon's terra firme forests are anthropogenic in nature resulting from the careful management of biodiversity by indigenous people. However, unlike current cultivation techniques, these Amazonians were attuned to the ecological realities of their environment from five millennia of experimentation and understood how to sustainably manage the rainforest to suit their needs. They saw the importance of maintaining biodiversity through a mosaic of natural forest, open fields, and sections of forest managed so as to be dominated by species of special interest to humans.
Many of these populations existed along whitewater rivers where they had good means of transportation, excellent fishing, and fertile floodplain soils for agriculture. However, when Europeans arrived, these were the first settlements to be affected since Europeans used the major rivers as highways to the interior. In the first century of European presence, the Amerindian population was reduced by 90%. Most of the remaining peoples lived in the interior of the forest: either pushed there by the Europeans, or traditionally living there in smaller groups.
Amazon Civilization Before Columbus
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Study reconfirms theory on sedentary societies in the Amazon
A rain forest debate: Could it have been home to complex societies?
By Marion Lloyd, Globe Correspondent | January 4, 2005
Source
IRANDUBA, Brazil -- High along bluffs overlooking the confluence of the mighty Negro and Solomes rivers, super-sized eggplants, papayas and cassava spring from the ground.
Their exuberance defies a long-held belief about the Amazon. For much of the last half-century, archeologists have viewed the South American rain forest as a ''counterfeit paradise" whose inhospitable environment precluded the development of complex societies.
But new research suggests that prehistoric people found ways to overcome the jungle's natural limitations and thrive in large numbers.
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.
The research has implications not only for history but for the future of the Amazon rain forest. If scientists could discover how the Amerindians transformed the soil, farmers could use the technology to maximize the productivity of smaller plots of land, rather than cutting down ever larger swaths of jungle. The benefits of this ''gift from the past" are already known to farmers in the area, who plant their crops wherever they find terra preta.
''It's made by pre-Columbian Indians and it's still fertile," said Bruno Glaser, a soil chemist from the University of Bayreuth in Germany who took samples of terra preta recently near the jungle town of Iranduba. ''If we knew how to do this, it would be a model for agriculture in the whole region."
This specially modified soil is scattered across millions of acres in the Amazon rain forest, in some areas comprising 10 percent of the ground area. And it is typically packed with potsherds and other signs of human habitation.
''We believe there weren't just tribal societies here, but rather complex chiefdoms, and we're providing the proof," said James B. Petersen, an archeologist from the University of Vermont who has spent the past decade working in the Brazilian Amazon. His team of American and Brazilian archeologists, who call themselves the Central Amazon Project, have excavated more than 60 sites rich in terra preta near the jungle city of Manaus, where the Negro and Solomes rivers merge to form the Amazon River proper.
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 at the Federal University of So Paulo, who is codirector of the Central Amazon Project.
Scientists are working to determine whether terra preta, which contains high levels of organic matter and carbon, came about by accident or was the product of a deliberate effort to improve upon the notoriously poor rain-forest soil.
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.
''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."
Meggers, who is director of the Latin American Archaeology Program at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History in Washington, has spent her life trying to prove that the Amazon rain forest is a uniquely untrammeled and hostile wilderness. Now 82, her impact on the field dates to the late 1940s, when she began pioneering field work on Maraj Island at the mouth of the Amazon River.
Her 1971 book, ''Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise," converted her views into gospel for a generation of Amazonian archeologists. In it, she argued that modern Amerindian groups, generally made up of a few hundred people, follow ancient practices of infanticide and other population-control measures to exist in a hostile environment.
''It had a huge impact. Virtually every Anthropology 1 class read that book," said Susanna B. Hecht, a geographer at the University of California at Los Angeles who has spent three decades studying traditional farming practices in the Amazon. During a recent study of the modern-day Kayap Indians in central Brazil, she was surprised to discover they were creating a version of terra preta by burning excess vegetation and weeds, and mixing the charcoal into the soil. The practice confirmed Hecht's belief that the Indians have inherited techniques that enable them to farm the rain-forest soil longterm.
Hecht said the technique probably was more sophisticated and more widespread before Indian societies were devastated by the arrival of the Europeans, who brought with them measles, typhoid and other diseases for which the Indians had no resistance. By some estimates, 95 percent of the Amerindians died within the first 130 years of contact. There are now roughly 350,000 Amerindians living in Brazil.
''I think you could have had very dense populations, and what you had was a real holocaust in various forms," she said. Little was known, however, about the impact of those epidemics when Meggers was first writing, Hecht noted, and her persuasive arguments against large civilizations discouraged archeologists from probing deeper into the Amazon.
But some researchers challenged Meggers' theories early on, arguing that pre-Columbian civilizations modified their environment for large-scale agriculture. Others have gone further, suggesting that the Amazonian people may have created huge cities that rivaled those of the Aztecs and Maya.
''There is some fussing about the magnitude, from tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions," said William I. Woods, a geographer at the University of Kansas who has worked extensively in the region. ''But I don't think there are too many scholars who have any problems with chiefdoms existing and lots of people being supported for long times in various places in the Amazon."
� Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
Source: Boston Globe
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