1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [163]
As anthropologists have learned more about the vagaries of fieldwork, they have treated Carvajal more kindly. “He may not have been making up the Amazons out of whole cloth,” William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, told me. “It is possible that he saw female warriors, or warriors whom he believed were female. If he asked Indians about them, he could have misunderstood their answers. Or he could have understood them correctly, but not understood that his informants were pulling his leg. We now understand that ethnography is complex, and it’s easy to go wrong.” In recent years, these blanket dismissals have been challenged.
More important, anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, and historians who were reassessing the environmental impact of indigenous cultures in North and Central America inevitably turned to the tropical forest. And in growing numbers researchers came to believe that the Amazon basin, too, bears the fingerprints of its original inhabitants. Far from being the timeless, million-year-old wilderness portrayed on calendars, these scientists say, today’s forest is the product of a historical interaction between the environment and human beings—human beings in the form of the populous, long-lasting Indian societies described by Carvajal.
Such claims raise the hackles of many conservationists and ecologists. Amazonia, activists warn, is sliding toward catastrophe so rapidly that saving it must become a global priority. With bulldozers poised to destroy one of the planet’s last great wild places, environmentalists say, claiming that the basin comfortably housed large numbers of people for millennia is so irresponsible as to be almost immoral—it is tantamount to giving developers a green light.
The Amazon is not wild, archaeologists and anthropologists retort. And claiming that it is will, in its ignorance, worsen the ecological ailments that activists would like to cure. Like their confreres elsewhere in the Americas, Indian societies had built up a remarkable body of knowledge about how to manage and improve their environment. By denying the very possibility of such practices, these researchers say, environmentalists may hasten, rather than halt, the demise of the forest.
GREEN PRISON
The nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Belt may have said it best. In what Darwin called “the best of all natural history journals,” Belt set down what has become the classic image of the tropical forest: a gigantic, teeming expanse, wildly diverse biologically but otherwise undifferentiated. “A ceaseless round of ever-active life weaves the forest scenery of the tropics into one monotonous whole,” as he put it. And since Belt’s day, terms like “Amazonia” and “Amazon basin” are often used as if they referred to a single, homogeneous entity.
AMAZON BASIN
This practice irritates professional geographers no end. Strictly speaking, “Amazon basin” refers to the drainage of the Amazon and its tributaries. “Amazonia,” by contrast, refers to the bigger region bounded by the Andes to the west, the Guiana Shield to the north, and the Brazilian Shield to the south. And neither is coterminous with the “Amazonian rainforest.” To begin with, not all of the “Amazonian rainforest” is rainy—parts of it receive little more precipitation per year than New York City. On top of that, about a third of Amazonia is not forest but savanna—the Beni, in Bolivia, is the biggest chunk. The river’s floodplain and that of its tributaries take up another 5 to 10 percent of the basin. Only about half of Amazonia is upland forest—vines overhead in a tangle like sailing ships rigged by drunks; tree branches in multiple layers; beetles the size of butterflies and butterflies the size of birds—the ecosystem that