1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [165]
Ethnographic celebrities, the Yanomamo are often portrayed as windows into the past, inhabitants of a forest wilderness they have inhabited, almost unchanged, for millennia. Recent studies have cast doubt on this picture. Indeed, the Yanomamo are relative newcomers to their homeland, many of them moving there only in the seventeenth century as they fled European diseases and cruelty further south. Some scholars believe their societies were originally so much larger and more materially complex that what is often pictured as an almost idyllic, “natural” existence is in fact a life in poor exile.
Swidden, Meggers admitted, has a major drawback: it cannot yield enough to support a complex society. More intensive farming might produce the requisite surplus, but cannot be sustained; the plowed land, exposed to the elements, is destroyed in as little as a decade. Even with slash-and-burn, ecologists say, the forest can take as much as a hundred years to return completely to its previous state. European-style agriculture would not only fall victim to mega-Niños, it would permanently ruin the forest soils.
Carvajal therefore misunderstood what he saw, Meggers told me. Or else he had simply made up everything, and not just the Amazons. Caught in a lush, green trap, Indian villages could not possibly have grown as large as he reported—indeed, Meggers once proposed an upper limit of a thousand on their population. And the villages could not have been the sophisticated places he described, with their chiefly rulers, social classes, and specialized laborers (those military musicians on the Tapajós, for example). That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
“The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term period to learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of the environment,” Meggers said. “Any group that over-exploited their environment was going to be dead. The ones that survived, the knowledge got built into their ideology and behavior with taboos and other kinds of things.” Having reached the optimal cultural level for their environment, she explained, Amazon Indian lives changed little, if at all, for at least two thousand years.
As proof, Meggers pointed to Marajó, an island more than twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The island, low and often swampy, is created by the collision of the Amazon with the sea, which forces the river to disgorge dissolved sediments. Much of the island is submerged during the rainy season, and even in the dry summer pieces of the mazy shoreline are constantly calving off like icebergs and falling into the water. Yet despite the unpromising setting, the Marajóara created a sophisticated society there from about 800 to 1400 A.D.
The island’s pottery, some of it very large, has long been celebrated for its painted and incised representations of animals and plants, which are ornately entangled in a profusion that recalls the forest itself. The skillful pottery indicated that Marajó was a large-scale society—the only one then known in all of Amazonia. In the late 1940s Meggers and her husband, archaeologist Clifford J. Evans, decided to learn more.
The decision was ambitious. Archaeologists have traditionally avoided tropical forests, because the climate destroys all wood, cloth, and