1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [166]
At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined. The designs became cruder, the repertoire of themes reduced, the technical skill diminished. At the beginning, some grave sites were more elaborate than others, a testament to social stratification. Later on, all the dead were treated in the same mundane way. Early in their history, the Marajóara must have sneered at the lowly cultures on their borders. But as the forest, in a process out of Heart of Darkness, stripped away the layers of civilization, they became indistinguishable from their neighbors. A hundred years before Columbus, Meggers told me, they were blasted by a mega-Niño and then overrun by one of their erstwhile inferiors. The history of Marajó was all fall and no rise.
Betty Meggers
In a boldly written article in American Anthropologist in 1954, Meggers proclaimed the implications:
There is a force at work to which man through his culture must bow. This determinant operates uniformly regardless of time, place (within the forest), psychology or race. Its leveling effect appears to be inescapable. Even modern efforts to implant civilization in the South American tropical forest have met with defeat, or survive only with constant assistance from the outside. In short, the environmental potential of the tropical forest is sufficient to allow the evolution of culture to proceed only to the level represented by [slash-and-burn farmers]; further indigenous evolution is impossible, and any more highly evolved culture attempting to settle and maintain itself in the tropical forest environment will inevitably decline to the [slash-and-burn] level.
The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of culture.” And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: “The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies.”
How did Marajó escape, even temporarily, the iron grasp of its environment? And why was there no sign of its initial climb past ecological limits, only of its subsequent collapse before them? Meggers and Evans provided the answers three years later in an influential monograph. Marajó, they said, was not actually an Amazonian society. In fact, it was a failed cutting from a more sophisticated culture in the Andes, a cousin of Wari or Tiwanaku. Stranded in the wet desert of the Amazon, the culture struggled to gain its footing, tottered a few steps, and died.
Counterfeit Paradise was the product of more than twenty years of research. But that was not the sole reason for the book’s influence. Meggers’s message of limitation, published within a year of the first Earth Day, resonated in the ears of readers newly converted to the ecological movement. Since then countless campaigns to save the rainforest have driven home its lesson: development in tropical forests destroys both forests and their developers. Promulgated in ecology textbooks, Meggers’s argument became a wellspring of the campaign to save rainforests, one of the few times in recent history that humankind has actually tried to profit from the lessons of the past.
Yet even as the themes of Counterfeit Paradise spread to the worlds of natural science and political activism, Meggers’s ideas exerted ever-diminishing influence in archaeology itself. From her distinguished post at the Smithsonian, she battled on behalf of the law of environmental limitation. But her main accomplishment may have been inadvertently to keep new ideas about Amazonian