1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [178]
One of the biggest patches of terra preta is on the high bluffs at the mouth of the Tapajós, near Santarém. First mapped in the 1960s by the late Wim Sombroek, director of the International Soil Reference and Information Center in Wageningen, the Netherlands, the terra preta zone is three miles long and half a mile wide, suggesting widespread human habitation—exactly what Orellana saw. The plateau has never been carefully excavated, but observations by geographers Woods and Joseph McCann of the New School in New York City indicate that it is thick with ceramics. If the agriculture practiced in the lower Tapajós were as intensive as in the most complex cultures in precontact North America, Woods told me, “you’d be talking something capable of supporting about 200,000 to 400,000 people”—making it at the time one of the most densely populated places in the world.
Woods was part of an international consortium of scientists studying terra preta. If its secrets could be unraveled, he said, it might improve the expanses of bad soil that cripple agriculture in Africa—a final gift from the peoples who brought us tomatoes, maize, manioc, and a thousand different ways of being human.
“Betty Meggers would just die if she heard me saying this,” Woods told me. “Deep down her fear is that this data will be misused.” In 2001, Meggers charged in an article in Latin American Antiquity that archaeologists’ claims that the Amazon could support intensive agriculture were effectively telling “developers [that they] are entitled to operate without restraint.” These researchers had thus become unwitting “accomplices in the accelerating pace of environmental degradation.” Centuries after the conquistadors, she lamented, “the myth of El Dorado is being revived by archaeologists.”
Doubtless her political anxieties are not without justification, although—as some of her sparring partners observed—it is difficult to imagine greedy plutocrats “perusing the pages of Latin American Antiquity before deciding to rev up the chainsaws.” But the new picture doesn’t automatically legitimate burning down the forest. Instead it suggests that for a long time clever people who knew tricks that we have yet to learn used big chunks of Amazonia nondestructively. Faced with an ecological problem, the Indians fixed it. Rather than adapt to Nature, they created it. They were in the midst of terra-forming the Amazon when Columbus showed up and ruined everything.
The Artificial Wilderness
A THOUSAND KUDZUS EVERYWHERE
Until about 200 million years ago Eurasia and the Americas were lashed together in a single landmass that geologists call Pangaea. Pangaea broke into pieces, sending the continents drifting like barges across the ocean floor. For millions of years, the separate fragments of Pangaea had almost no communication. Evolution set their species spinning off on separate trajectories, and the flora and fauna of each land diverged so far from each other that the astounded Columbus remarked that “all the trees were as different from ours as day from night, and so the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and all things.”
Columbus was the first to see the yawning biological gap between Europe and the Americas. He was also one of the last to see it in pure form: his visit, as Alfred Crosby put it, initiated the process of knitting together the seams of Pangaea. Ever since 1492, the hemispheres have become more and more alike, as people mix the world’s organisms into a global stew. Thus bananas and coffee, two African crops, become the principal agricultural exports of Central America; maize and manioc, domesticated in Mesoamerica and