(...) Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (1971), perhaps the most influential book ever written about the Amazon (...). Written by Betty J. Meggers, the Smithsonian archaeologist, Amazonia says that the apparent lushness of the rain forest is a sham. (...) Agriculture, which depends on extracting the wealth of the soil, therefore faces inherent ecological limitations in the wet desert of Amazonia. As a result, Meggers argued, Indian villages were forced to remain small (...) Beginning in 1948 Meggers and her late husband, Clifford Evans, excavated a chiefdom on Marajó, an island twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The Marajóara, they concluded, were failed offshoots of a sophisticated culture in the Andes. Transplanted to the lush trap of the Amazon, the culture choked and died.
Green activists saw the implication: development in tropical forests destroys both the forests and their developers. Meggers’s account had enormous public impact - Amazonia is one of the wellsprings of the campaign to save rain forests.
Then Anna C. Roosevelt, an anthropologist at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, re-excavated Marajó. Her complete report, Moundbuilders of the Amazon (1991), was like the anti-matter version of Amazonia. Marajó, she argued, was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World,” a military and commercial powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had “up to one million” inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “intensive cultivation” and “large, dense populations” had im proved it: the most luxuriant and diverse growth was on the lands formerly occupied by the Marajóara. “If you listened to Meggers’s theory, these places should have been a mess,” Roosevelt says.
Meggers scoffed at Roosevelt’s “extravagant claims,” “polemical tone,” and “defamatory remarks.” (...) The dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it has featured vituperative references to colonialism, elitism, and employment by the CIA.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt’s team investigated Painted Rock Cave. On the floor of the cave what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. The archaeologists slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch. When the traces of human occupation vanished, they kept digging. (“You always go a meter past sterile,” Roosevelt says.) A few inches below they struck the charcoal-rich dirt that signifies human habitation - a civilization, Roosevelt said later, that wasn’t supposed to be there. For many millennia the cave’s inhabitants hunted and gathered for food.
But by about 4,000 years ago they were growing crops perhaps as many as 140 of them, according to Charles R. Clement, an anthropological botanist at the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research.
Unlike Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, he says, centered their agriculture on the Amazon’s unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. “It’s tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools,” Clement says. “If you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your work instead of two or three.” Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings.
In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. “I basically think it’s all human-created,” Clement told me in Brazil.
He argues that Indians changed the assortment and density of species throughout the region. So does Clark Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist, who told me in Bolivia that the low land tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said, smiling mischievously. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, “lots” of botanists believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.”
The phrase “built environment,” Erickson says, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.” “Landscape” in this case is meant exactly - Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists’ claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta - rich, fertile “dark earth” that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings. Terra preta, Woods guesses, covers at least 10 percent of Amazonia, an area the size of France. It has amazing properties. Contrary to theory, he says, tropical rain doesn’t leach nutrients from terra preta fields. Instead the soil, so to speak, fights back.
Not far from Painted Rock Cave is a 300-acre area with a two-foot layer of terra preta quarried by locals for potting soil. The bottom third of the layer is never removed, workers there explain, because over time it will re-create the original soil layer in its initial thickness. The reason, scientists suspect, is that terra preta is generated by a special suite of microorganisms that resists depletion. “Apparently,” Woods and the Wisconsin geographer Joseph M. McCann argued in a presentation last summer, “at some threshold level ... dark earth attains the capacity to perpetuate - even regenerate itself - thus behaving more like a living ‘super’-organism than an inert material.”
In as yet unpublished research the archaeologists Eduardo Neves, of the University of São Paulo; Michael Heckenberger, of the University of Florida; and their colleagues examined terra preta in the upper Xingu, a huge southern tributary of the Amazon. Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly - suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculatedbad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time. When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said goofy things like “wow” and “gosh.” Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind.
Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything. Scientists should study the microorganisms in terra preta, Woods told me, to find out how they work. If that could be learned, maybe some version of Amazonian dark earth could be used to improve the vast expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa - a final gift from the people who brought us tomatoes, corn, and the immense grasslands of the Great Plains.
“Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,” Woods told me. “Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused.”
Indeed, Meggers’s recent Latin American Antiquity article charged that archaeologists who say the Amazon can support agriculture are effectively telling “developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint.” Resuscitating the myth of El Dorado, in her view, “makes us accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.”
Doubtless there is something to this - although, as some of her critics responded in the same issue of the journal, it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chain saws.”
But the new picture doesn’t automatically legitimize paving the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time big chunks of Amazonia were used nondestructively by clever people who knew tricks we have yet to learn. I visited Painted Rock Cave during the river’s annual flood, when it wells up over its banks and creeps inland for miles. Farmers in the floodplain build houses and barns on stilts and watch pink dolphins sport from their doorsteps. Ecotourists take shortcuts by driving motorboats through the drowned forest. Guys in dories chase after them, trying to sell sacks of incredibly good fruit. All of this is described as “wilderness” in the tourist brochures. It’s not, if researchers like Roosevelt are correct. Indeed, they believe that fewer people may be living there now than in 1491. (...)