1491_ New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus - Charles C. Mann [237]
“We were eating”: Heaton ed. 1934:408.
Angry hives: I have borrowed the simile from Smith 1990:68. The next two sentences are essentially reworkings of his sentences.
Carvajal on populousness, Tapajós attacks: Heaton 1934 (“farther we went,” 202; “all inhabited,” “five leagues,” 198; “numerous and very large,” 200; “Inland,” 216; “more than twenty,” 203).
Carvajal publication: Medina ed. 1894.
Carvajal criticism: López de Gómara 1979:131 (“mentirosa”); Myers et al. 1992; Denevan 1996a:661–64; see also, Shoumatoff 1986. Oddly, critics rarely mention that Orellana’s account is similar to those from the second Amazon expedition. This was the Pedro de Orsua expedition of 1559–61, subject of the Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. The basic sources are collected in González and Tur eds. 1981. It stopped at the Tapajós in 1561, but provided little further information about the region, except for the suggestive fact that the Indian towns’ streets were laid out in a grid and that they had wooden temples with deities painted on the doors (González and Tur eds. 1981:111, 370).
Ecologists’ views: Arnold 2000. For how they fit into the general Western propensity to view the Amazon as a tropical Eden, see Holanda 1996; Slater 1995; and the polemical Stott 1999. German ecologist Andreas Schimper invented “tropical rain forest” as a scientific construct in 1898 (Schimper 1903). It was an example of a new scientific category that included the living community and its nonliving environment together as a single functioning unit—an ecosystem, a term Schimper’s school coined in 1935.
More sympathetic views of Carvajal: Author’s intervews, Balée, Erickson, Peter Stahl, Anna Roosevelt. See also, Porro 1994, Whitehead 1994, for contemporary treatments of early accounts.
Must become priority: E.g., “The time bomb of ecological, environmental, climatic and human damage caused by deforestation continues to tick, and the problem of tropical rainforest clearance must remain a priority within international politics” (Park 1992:162).
“A ceaseless round”: Belt 1985:184; Darwin ed. 1887 (vol. 3):188 (“best of all”).
Richards: Richards 1952. Richards’s ideas drew heavily on the idea of the natural progression of ecosystems toward a final, stable “climax” developed by ecologists Frederick E. Clements and Arthur George Tansley. In this view, the tropical forest was the climax, the ultimate vegetative destination, in hot, humid areas.
“wet desert”: The image of the Amazon as a lush forest growing on a desert was apparently popularized in Goodland and Irwin 1975.
Rainforest soils: This argument is crisply stated in Wilson 1992:273–74.
Counterfeit Paradise: Meggers 1996 (orig. ed., 1971).
Slash-and-burn as ecologically sensitive response: Interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1996: 20–23. See also, Kleinman, Bryant, and Pimentel 1996; Luna-Orea and Wagger 1996.
Unchanged harmony: “In the Western imagination, more generally speaking, the Amazon has stood for centuries as the benchmark of primordial (pure) nature and as a refuge of ‘primitive’ peoples: our contemporary ancestors” (Heckenberger, forthcoming).
Yanomamo as windows into the past: E.g., Brooke 1991 (“a tribe virtually untouched by modern civilization whose ways date from the Stone Age”); Chagnon 1992. In the foreword to the latter, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls the Yanomamo “the final tribes living strong and free in the style of the preliterate peoples first encountered by Europeans five centuries ago.” To Wilson, “the Yanomamö way of life gives us the clearest view of the conditions under which the human mind evolved biologically during deep history”(ix).
“mega-Niño events”: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1994; 1979 (other climatic constraints).
El Niño fires: Cochrane and Schulze 1998; Pyne 1995:60–65. Fires from