1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [169]
Montaigne’s successors quickly turned his views upside-down. Like him, they viewed Amazonians as existing outside history, but they now regarded this as a bad thing. The French natural historian Charles Marie de la Condamine retraced Orellana’s journey in 1743. He emerged with great regard for the forest—and none for its inhabitants. The peoples of the Peruvian Amazon were nothing more than “forest animals,” he said. “Before making them Christians, they must first be made human.” In softened form, Condamine’s views persisted into the twentieth century. “Where man has remained in the tropics, with few exceptions, he has suffered arrested development,” the prominent geographer Ellen Churchill Semple remarked in 1911. “His nursery has kept him a child.” To be sure, advocates of environmental limitations today do not endorse the racist views of the past, but they still regard the original inhabitants of the Amazon as trapped in their environment like flies in amber. Meggers’s “law of environmental limitation of culture,” her critics in essence say, is nothing but a green variant of Holmberg’s Mistake.
Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it featured charges of colonialism, elitism, and membership in the CIA. Particularly vexing to Meggers was that some of the same people who demanded minutely detailed proof for pre-Clovis sites had cheerfully accepted Roosevelt’s revisionism about Marajó. A big, prosperous city rising up on its own in the stifling Amazon forest? Meggers could not contain her disbelief. “I wish a psychologist would look into this,” she said to me.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt went on to Painted Rock Cave. On the cave floor what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. Roosevelt’s team slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch. Even when the traces of human occupation ceased, they kept digging down. (“You always go a meter past sterile,” she told me.) A few inches below what she had thought would be the last layer of human habitation she hit another—a culture, Roosevelt said later, that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was as much as thirteen thousand years old.
Painted Rock Cave was occupied at roughly the same time that the Clovis culture was thriving to the north. But Amazon paleo-Indians didn’t live in the same way as their northern counterparts, Roosevelt said. They didn’t make or use Clovis points. They didn’t hunt big game (almost none exists in the Amazon). Instead they plucked wild fruits from the forest, painted handprints on the walls, and ate the Amazon’s 1,500 species of fish, especially the 500-pound piraruçu, the world’s biggest freshwater fish. And then, after 1,200 years, these early people left the cave for good.
Painted Rock Cave became inhabited again in about 6000 B.C. Probably it was no more than temporary shelter, a refuge when floodwaters got too high. People could have brought in loads of turtles and shellfish, built a fire in the shelter of the cave, and enjoyed the feel of dry land. In any case these people—Roosevelt called them the Paituna culture, after a nearby village—had ceramic bowls, red- to gray-brown. Found at Painted Rock Cave and other places in the area, it is the oldest known pottery in the Americas.
And so there were two occupations: one very old, with ceramics; the other even older, without them. To Roosevelt, the first settlement of Painted Rock Cave demonstrated that the Amazon forest was not settled by a copy or offshoot of Clovis. This early culture was a separate entity—another nail in the coffin of the Clovis-as-template theory, to her way of thinking. The second occupation, with its early and apparently independent development of ceramics, demonstrated something equally vital: Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance.
By about four thousand years ago