Ancient Amazonian Civilizations:
vast anthropogenic landscapes...

Source:

Heckenberger, Michael J.. The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D. 1000-2000. New York and London: Routledge, 2005.

Pages 23-25, high-lighted, italicized, or paragraphed at will:

The ecology of the Upper Xingu

"One of the most critical features of the land, both forests and wetlands, is the degree to which it has been altered or domesticated by Xinguanos, creating vast anthropogenic landscapes (Baleé 1989). When I first lived in the Kuikuru (Xinguano) community in 1993, it took me sometime to discard my own preconceived notions of tropical forests and realize just how constructed and artificial the landscape was.

Contrast with Marajó Island or lowland Bolivia

"Unlike Marajó Island or lowland Bolivia, where major earthworks in open grasslands had been known for many decades (Denevan 1966; Meggers and Evans 1957), the ancient occupational remains in the Upper Xingu are entirely covered in forest. Nonetheless, the conclusion that much of the landscape was not only anthropogenic in origin but intentionally constructed and managed is inescapable the more the scale of ancient settlements and their monuments (e.g., plaza and causeway peripheral mounds and massive ditches) are investigated.

[Do] not assume that any part of the forest is pristine.

"Today, I would not assume that any part of the forest is pristine without a detailed examination on the ground. In place of small paths in the forest and minor openings related to plaza villages and gardens, I now envision tree-lined causeways, well maintained, broad roads, large, patchy tracts of agricultural fields leading out from the towns and villages that make up the skeleton of Xinguano history, and an equally well-constructed wetland environnment, including major transportation canals, managed ponds, improved fishing, drinking and bathing reservoirs, raised causeways, wells, raised fields, and road systems, among other features.

Populations were significantly larger in the past

"The scale and constructed nature of the Xinguano landscape also draws attention to the fact that the fixity and intensity of land use was higher in the past and not only were populations significantly larger, but space was much more tightly controlled."

Page 345

Xinguanos today

"In the specific local context, Xinguanos are people committed to settled village life, guided by bodily disciplines that are part and parcel of a fully agricultural economy. They are in a constant oscillation between domesticating nature and being domesticated by it.

This is also an ecology of power

This is also an ecology of power, which also involves a complicated process of domination and resistance of different types of persons. Not only are the people tied to a very long history of plant domestication, in this case bitter manioc, as is true of Amazonians, in general, but as manioc people, banking over 80 percent of their subsistence output in it (Carneiro 983).

The Xinguanos: carriers of deep Amazonian histories, the descendants of very ancient persons, ancestors.

"They are continuously and actively at work managing their lands and rebuilding their houses and settlements, and how could it be otherwise in a tropical forest environment that creeps back into gardens, paths, and even villages if not carefully tended. They do not chip away at the high forest for the short-term satisfaction of a new garden, but instead to open areas for long-term management, areas that are owned as gardens and orchards, or is simply reincorporated in the extraordinarily complex mosaic of the Xinguano countryside.

"It is an impossibility, however, to conceive of a Xinguano landscape without forest mixed with the highly domesticated fields, gardens, orchards and the diverse constructions associated with roads, settlements and wetlands: the people could not survive socially, symbolically or economically without forest.

The point is that Xinguanos are uniquely situated in and adapted to their landscapes, as well as carriers of deep Amazonian histories, the descendants of very ancient persons, ancestors.

"Historical anthropology in the tropical lowlands over the past several decades suggests that diverse Amazonian peoples were linked across the entire region into vast social networks, as is now well known in North America, Africa, Oceania, and across the non-Western world, at least before European colonialism truncated native world systems and strictly indigenous histories."