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By Root 1885 0

“had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and marriage relations in a whole area. They led to new trade networks, they led to new political alliances, they even led to war.” Researchers have often described the Yanomamo as “fierce,” aggressive sorts whose small villages are constantly at violent odds with one another. In Ferguson’s estimation, one cause of the endemic conflict observed by Western anthropologists and missionaries was the anthropologists and missionaries themselves, who gave their subjects “literally boatloads” of steel tools—axes, hatchets, machetes—to ingratiate themselves. At a stroke, the village hosting the Westerners would gleam with wealth; its neighbors would seek a share of the undeserved bounty; conflict would explode. “Steel to the Yanomamo was like gold for the Spanish,” Ferguson said. “It could push fairly ordinary people to do things that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise.” (The anthropologists and missionaries there vehemently deny Ferguson’s claims. But so far as I am aware they did not call his scenario impossible. Rather, they said that to avoid unhappy consequences they had carefully controlled the amount of gift giving.)

Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M. Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer, told me. “This picture of swidden as this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance with Nature—that is mostly or entirely a myth, I think. At least there’s no evidence for it, and a fair amount of evidence against it, including the evidence of simple logic.” Slash-and-burn, supposedly a quintessentially Amazonian trait, “is a modern intrusion.”

A similar phenomenon seems to have taken place in North America, where Indians were widely said to have practiced slash-and-burn as part of their habit of living lightly on the land. Dismissing the data to back up these claims as “gossamer,” the geographer William E. Doolittle of the University of Texas noted in 2000 that most colonial accounts showed Indians clearing their fields permanently, even ripping stumps out to prevent them from sprouting. “Once fields were cleared, the intent was to cultivate them permanently, or at least for very long periods of time.” As populations rose, “farmers cleared new fields from the remaining forests.” Slash-and-burn was a product of European axes—and European diseases, which so shrank Indian groups that they adopted this less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture.

In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did before swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

RAINDROP PHYSICS

The papaya orchard was so robust and healthy that it looked like an advertisement—the background image behind a celebrity endorser of a new papaya drink. Sweating in the equatorial sun, some of the researchers admiringly fingered the plump, pendulous green fruit, each the size of a baby’s head, wrapped in clusters around the trees’ sturdy trunks. Other scientists bent down and with equal approbation scooped up handfuls of dirt. The road to the plantation had been cut into the Amazon’s famously poor soil—it was the blaring orangered of cheap makeup, almost surreally bright against the great dark green leaves of the