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By Root 2058 0

a big El Niño in 1925–26 were described in a short, apparently self-published monograph by Giuseppe Marchesi (Marchesi 1975) that I found in a used-book store in Manaus. According to Marchesi, the fires on the Río Negro were so intense that the smoke blocked out the sun in Manaus, hundreds of miles away.

Recovery time of forest: Uhl 1987; Uhl and Jordan 1984; Uhl et al. 1982.

Upper limit of a thousand: Meggers (1954) says that the rainforest will not permit societies to surpass the “Tropical Forest” pattern of slash-and-burn subsistence (809), which she defines as “villages of 50–1,000 pop[ulation]” (814, fig. 1). The implication is that environmental limits set the maximum village population at one thousand.

Meggers dismisses Carvajal: Meggers 1996:187 (“Evidence [of environmental limits] casts doubt on the accuracy of the early European descriptions of large sedentary populations along the floodplain”). Oddly, Meggers endorsed Carvajal in the same book (“These eyewitness reports of numerous large villages are substantiated by archaeological evidence,” 133). See also, Meggers 1992a, 1992c.

Unchanged lives, population: Meggers 1992 (two thousand years, 199).

Meggers and Marajó: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Popsin 2003; Meggers and Evans 1957. See also Schaan 2004.

Meggers’s law: Meggers 1954 (“There is a force,” 809; “level to which,” 815). Meggers called the stage of slash-and-burn cultivation the “Tropical Forest” pattern. In the brackets, I have replaced references to that term. Her law drew on the environmental-determinist arguments of earlier geographers such as Ellen Churchill Semple, whose Influences of Geographic Environment trained two generations of researchers: “The geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently…[and] is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man” (Semple 1911:2).

Marajó as offshoot: Meggers and Evans 1957:412–18. See also, Evans and Meggers 1968. Meggers and Evans were influenced by Julian Steward, editor of the influential Handbook of South American Indians, who also thought that Marajóara culture originated somewhere else—the Caribbean, he suspected (Steward 1948).

Diminishing influence: “Few contemporary scholars accept the hypothesis of environmental limitations and lack of cultural development in the Amazon Basin” (Erickson 2004:457).

“Rather than admiration”: Cunha 1975:1. I thank Susanna Hecht for letting me use her translation, which is from her forthcoming compilation of da Cunha’s Amazonian writings. In the meantime, the original version of this marvelous book can be found at http://www.librairie.hpg.com.br/Euclides-da-Cunha-A-Margem-da-Historia.rtf.

Not a disaster: I paraphrase anthropologist Roland Bergman (Bergman 1980:53, quoted in Denevan 2001:60).

Rock paintings: Author’s visit; Consens 1989.

Roosevelt reexcavates: Author’s interviews, Roosevelt; Roosevelt 1991 (“outstanding indigenous,” 29; “100,000,” 2).

Earlier challenges to Meggers: Author’s interviews, Balée, Denevan, Erickson, Peter Stahl, Woods. Donald Lathrap of the University of Illinois (1970), Michael Coe of Yale (1957), and Robert L. Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (1995, see refs.) mounted the most important ones.

Meggers reaction: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1992b (“polemical,” 399; “extravagant,” 403). See also Meggers 2004, 2001.

Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233–36.

“forest animals”: Condamine 1986, quoted in Myers et al. 2004:22.

“Where man has remained”: Semple 1911:635. The ideas in Influences of Geographic Environment were typical for their day. “The Amazon winds its slow way amid the malarious languor of vast tropical forests in which the trees shut out the sky and the few natives are apathetic with the eternal inertia of the hot, damp tropics,” Semple’s Yale contemporary, Ellsworth Huntington, wrote in 1919 (Huntington