"Scientists find evidence discrediting theory Amazon was virtually unlivable"

Fri Sep 3 15:59:04 UTC 2010

Matéria publicada no *Washington Post* de hoje (3/set/2010):
http://bit.ly/samiria

*Scientists find evidence discrediting theory Amazon was virtually unlivable
*

By Juan Forero
Friday, September 3, 2010; 11:10 AM

SAN MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU -

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals
virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous
fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes
to the unruly tangle of jungle vines.

Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch
of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an
advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched
infertile soils to feed thousands.

The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long
held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black
hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever
sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer
tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an
unforgiving environment.

But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups
that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited
the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people
than live here today.

"There is a gigantic footprint in the forest," said Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo,
49, a Colombian-born professor at the University of Florida who is working
this swath in northeast Peru.

Stooping over a man-made Indian mound on a recent day, he picked up shards
of ceramics and dark, nutrient-rich earth made fertile hundreds of years ago
by human hands. "All you can see is an artifact of the past," he said. "It's
a product of human actions."

The evidence is not just here outside tiny San Martin de Samiria, an
indigenous hamlet hours by speed boat from the jungle city of Iquitos. It is
found across Amazonia.

Outside, Manaus,
Brazil<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/brazil.html?nav=el>,
Eduardo Neves, a renowned Brazilian archaeologist, and American scientists
have found huge swaths of "terra preta," so-called Indian dark earth, land
made fertile by mixing charcoal, human waste and other organic matter with
soil. In 15 years of work that is still ongoing they have also found vast
orchards of semi-domesticated fruit trees, though they appear like forest
untrammeled by man.

Along the Xingu, an Amazon tributary in Brazil, Michael Heckenberger of the
University of Florida has found moats, causeways, canals, the networks of a
stratified civilization that, he says, existed as early as A.D. 800. In
Bolivia<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/bolivia.html?nav=el>,
American, German and Finnish archaeologists have been studying how
pre-Columbian Indians moved tons of soil and diverted rivers, major projects
of a society that existed long before the birth of Christ.

Many of these ongoing excavations follow the work of Anna C. Roosevelt. In
the 1980s on Marajo Island, at the mouth of the Amazon, she turned up house
foundations, elaborate pottery and evidence of an agriculture so advanced
she believes the society there possibly had well over 100,000 inhabitants.

Her initial conclusions, published in 1991, helped redirect scientific
thinking about Amazonia, with younger archaeologists who followed
buttressing and building upon her findings.

"I think we're humanizing the history of the Amazon," said Neves, 44, a
professor at the University of Sao Paulo. "We're not looking at the Amazon
anymore as a black box. We're seeing that these people were just like
anywhere else in the world. We're giving them a sense of history."

The number of scientists who disagree has diminished, but influential
critics remain, none more so than Betty J. Meggers, director of Latin
American archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution. She said the new
theories are based more on wishful thinking than science.

"I'm sorry to say that archaeologists like to produce sensational refutation
of previous theories," said Meggers, whose 1971 book, "Amazonia: Man and
Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise," holds that the region is unfit for
large-scale habitation. "You know, this is how you get your promotions."

There is also concern among some that the new theories could pose a danger
to the Amazon. If the forest were not as unspoiled as previously thought,
they wonder, then wouldn't that serve as a green light to developers today?

"Just because the indigenous had complex societies that managed the forest
can't justify the large-scale transformations in the Amazon today," said
Zach Hurwitz, a geographer who consults International Rivers, a Berkeley,
Calif.-based environmental group that has raised concerns about dam building
projects and mineral exploration.
*A study of contrasts*

In some ways, the theory that the Amazon may have been a wellspring of
civilization should come as no surprise in the 21st century. In a long
perilous journey along Ecuador's Napo River in 1541, Spanish friar Gaspar de
Carvajal, a chronicler of the European conquest, wrote of "cities that
gleamed white," canoes that carried dozens of Indian warriors, "fine
highways" and "very fruitful land."

But until recently, scientists and explorers had all but rejected his work
as fantastical, the diaries of a man who would write anything to justify to
investors back in Spain that the hunt for El Dorado would bear fruit.

In sharp contrast, explorers in the 20th century noted that the Amazon held
no pyramids or stone aqueducts, like those of
Mexico<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/countries/mexico.html?nav=el>.
And the people they encountered belonged to small bands - Amazonian Indians
who appeared to be little more than human relics forgotten by time.

Roosevelt, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, said
that was because the civilizations encountered by Europeans quickly
disintegrated, victims of disease.

But until their demise, she said, their cultures were anything but
primitive. "They have magnitude, they have complexity," she said. "They are
amazing."
*A feel for the land*

Archaeology in the Amazon is not easy. Few rock formations meant that any
building had to rely on wood. Left untended - or abandoned - they would soon
be quickly swallowed by the jungle.

So those scientists who go today rely on new technologies to unearth the
past, from satellite imagery to ground-penetrating radar to remote sensors
to find ceramics.

Oyuela-Caycedo, the University of Florida archaeologist, and Nigel Smith, a
geographer and palm tree expert, have yet to use these tools here, a short
boat ride from this town, San Martin de Samiria. Instead they have been
trying to get a feel for the land beneath their feet.

On a recent morning, using a soil coring device, Oyuela-Caycedo extracted a
heavy, black dirt in a spot he calls Salvavidas, or Lifesaver. It was terra
preta, black, nutrient-rich, as good for agriculture as the soil in Iowa.

"It is the best soil that you can find in the Amazon," said Oyuela-Caycedo,
who wore netting over his face to protect him from mosquitoes. "You don't
find it in natural form."

Three feet deep here, and stretching nearly 100 acres, this terra preta
could have fed at least 5,000 people. The forests here were also carefully
managed in other ways, Oyuela-Caycedo believes, with the Indians planting
semi-domesticated trees that bore all manner of fruit, such as macambo,
sapote and jungle avocados.

Bits of colorful ceramics - matching that found elsewhere in the Amazon -
seem to show that those who lived here were the Omaguas, the same people
Gaspar de Carvajal encountered nearly 500 years before.

There is no doubt, Oyuela-Caycedo said, that the Omaguas faced hardship:
insects, poisonous snakes, poor soils. But their environment had vast
potential, he said, and the Omaguas exploited it before their civilization
was brought to heel by disease.

"The only thing they had to do was to change and transform the landscape,"
Oyuela Caycedo said. "And that is what they did."
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