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It was July—winter in the Amazon, the worst time of the year for fruit. Nevertheless, Clement was able to find yellow bacuri and purple açai. He plucked what looked like a four-foot version of a string bean from a branch, split it lengthwise, and showed me flattened, shiny seeds arrayed along its length like teeth in a jaw. Each seed was the size of a thumb bone and nestled in a fluffy white coating. “Try this,” he said. “It’s the ice-cream bean.” I put a seed in my mouth and sucked on it. The coating did taste quite like vanilla ice cream, and was just as refreshing. Three or four more fruits followed, each equally strange to me. (This is what people like about biodiversity.) Peach palm was not in season, but he found another member of the same genus. The fruit, when peeled, was unappetizing—quite like soggy cardboard in color, texture, and flavor. Clement squeezed some pulp. Oil dribbled from his fingers to the ground. “This’ll put some calories into you,” he said.

Planting their orchards for millennia, the first Amazonians slowly transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In the country inhabited by the Ka’apor, on the mainland southeast of Marajó, centuries of tinkering have profoundly changed the forest community. In Ka’apor-managed forests, according to Balée’s plant inventories, almost half of the ecologically important species are those used by humans for food. In similar forests that have not recently been managed, the figure is only 20 percent. Balée cautiously estimated, in a widely cited article published in 1989, that at least 11.8 percent, about an eighth, of the nonflooded Amazon forest was “anthropogenic”—directly or indirectly created by humans.

Some researchers today regard this figure as conservative. “I basically think it’s all human created,” Clement told me. So does Erickson, the University of Pennsylvania archaeologist who told me in Bolivia that the lowland tropical forests of South America are among the finest works of art on the planet. “Some of my colleagues would say that’s pretty radical,” he said. According to Peter Stahl, an anthropologist at the State University of New York in Binghamton, “lots” of researchers believe that “what the eco-imagery would like to picture as a pristine, untouched Urwelt [primeval world] in fact has been managed by people for millennia.” The phrase “built environment,” Erickson argued, “applies to most, if not all, Neotropical landscapes.”

GIFT FROM THE PAST

“Landscape,” in this case, is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to Susanna Hecht, a geographer at the University of California at Los Angeles, researchers into upland Amazonia took most of their soil samples along the region’s highways, which indeed passed through areas with awful soil—some regions were so saturated with toxic aluminum that they are now being mined for bauxite. A few scientists, though, found patches of something better. “In part because of the empty-Amazon model,” Hecht told me, these were “seen as anomalous and insignificant.” But in the 1990s researchers began studying these unusual regions of terra preta do Índio—rich, fertile “Indian dark earth” that anthropologists believe was made by human beings.

Throughout Amazonia, farmers prize terra preta for its great productivity; some have worked it for years with minimal fertilization. Among them are the owners of the papaya orchard I visited, who have happily grown crops on their terra preta for two decades. More surprising still, the ceramics in the farm’s terra preta indicate that the soil has retained its nutrients for as much as a millennium. On a local level, terra preta is valuable enough for locals to dig it up and sell as potting soil, an activity that, alas, has already destroyed countless artifacts. To the consternation of archaeologists, long planters full of ancient terra preta, complete with pre-Columbian