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protein. When dried, the white or pink pulp makes flour for thin, tortilla-like cakes; when boiled and smoked, it becomes hors d’oeuvres; when cooked and fermented, it makes beer. (The sap also makes a kind of wine.) Two crops a year are not uncommon; in terms of yield per acre, peach palms are typically much more productive than rice, beans, or maize. Trees begin producing fruit after three to five years and can continue for another seventy years. Like strawberries, peach palm throws out adventitious shoots. With a little care, these can be harvested for heart-of-palm—very tasty heart-of-palm, in my experience. Bactris gasipaes, as scientists call it, has more than two hundred common names: pupunha, cahipay, tembe, pejibaye, chontaduro, pijuayo. To Clement, the proliferation of names suggests the plant was used for many purposes by many cultures.

In the 1980s and early 1990s Clement measured peach palms throughout the Amazon basin. He learned that several physical characteristics, including fruit size, lay on a gradient with those apparently closest to the wild state in western Amazonia, near the Beni; the implication was that the tree might first have been cultivated there. Using a different method, Jorge Mora-Urpí, one of Clement’s collaborators, concluded that Indians might have bred the modern peach palm by hybridizing palms from several areas, including the Peruvian Amazon. Whatever the origin, people domesticated the species thousands of years ago and then spread it rapidly, first through Amazonia and then up into the Caribbean and Central America. Bactris gasipaes was in Costa Rica 1,700 to 2,300 years ago and probably earlier. By the time of Columbus, one seventeenth-century observer wrote, Native Americans valued it so highly “that only their wives and children were held in higher regard.”

Unlike maize or manioc, peach palm can thrive with no human attention. Tragically, this quality has proven to be enormously useful. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many Amazonian Indians, the Yanomamo among them, abandoned their farm villages, which had made them sitting ducks for European diseases and slave trading. They hid out in the forest, preserving their freedom by moving from place to place; in what Balée calls “agricultural regression,” these hunted peoples necessarily gave up farming and kept body and soul together by foraging. The “Stone Age tribespeople in the Amazon wilderness” that captured so many European imaginations were in large part a European creation and a historical novelty; they survived because the “wilderness” was largely composed of their ancestors’ orchards. “These old forests, called fallows, have traditionally been classified as high forest (pristine forest on well-drained ground) by Western researchers,” Balée wrote in 2003. But they “would not exist” without “human agricultural activities.” Indeed, Amazonians typically do not make the distinction between “cultivated” and “wild” landscapes common in the West; instead they simply classify landscapes into scores of varieties, depending on the types of species in each.

After we had spoken for a while Clement took me out of his office and into INPA’s experimental forest. To my untrained eye, it looked much the same as the forests around the lodges outside Manaus that attract ecotourists, except that INPA staffers kept down the undergrowth. There was the same cool green light from the canopy, the same refulgent smell, the same awe-inspiring sense of variety. The air vibrated with the same inharmonic racket of squealing, burbling, croaking, and cheeping birds. Dribbling down some of the tree trunks were little runnels that looked like dried sap. On a previous visit to the Amazon I had seen runnels just like these on a rubber tree in an abandoned plantation. Thinking it was a drip of latex sap, I plucked at one. It was the cover for a termite superhighway. Termites boiled out of the little tunnel and all over my hand. Termites bite. Flapping my hand wildly, I leapt back from the tree. My sandaled foot landed on a ground-wasp nest. In this