Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp.

"My goodness, what is UTEP's Anthropology Department going to do now?"

Adapted from The Atlantic Monthy, March 2002:

1491

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought -- an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe.

New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancements leads to a remarkable conjecture:

The Amazonian rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

by Charles C. Mann

"The plane took off in weather that was surprisngly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border.

"Clark Erickson [University of Pennsylvannia] and William Balée [Tulane University in New Orleans], the archaeologists, sat up front.

"Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long.

30,000 square miles of forest mounds constructed over 2,000 years ago

"It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape -- 30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways -- was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

"Erickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus.

"One way to summarize the views of people like Erickson and Balée would be to say that in their opinion Indians were here far longer than previously thought, and in far greater numbers.

And the [Indians] were so successful at imposing their will on the landscape that in 1492 Columbus set foot in a hemisphere thoroughy dominated by humankind.

"Given the charged relations between white societies and native peoples, inquiry into Indian culture and history is inevitably contentious. But the recent scholarship is especially controversial.

"To begin with, some researchers -- many but not all from an older generation -- deride the new theories as fantasies arising from an almost willful misinterpretation of data and a perverse kind of political correctness. I have seen no evidence that large numbers of people ever lived in the Beni, says Betty J. Meggers, of the Smithsonian Institution. Claiming otherwise is just wishful thinking. Similar criticisms apply to many of the new scholarly claims about Inidans, according to Dean R. Snow, an anthropologist at Pennsylvannia State University. The problem is that you can make the meager evidence from the ethnohistorical record tell you anything you want, he says. It's easy to kid yourself.

Amazonia has become the emblem of vanishing wilderness -- an admonitory image of untouched Nature. But the rain forest itself may be a cultural artifact -- that is, an artificial object.

"The Beni is a case in point. In addition to building up the Beni mounds for houses and gardens, Erickson says, the Indians trapped fish in the seasonally flooded grassland. Indeed, he says, they fashioned dense zigzagging networks of earthern fish weirs bewteen the causeways.

"To keep the habitat clear of unwanted trees and undergrowth, they regularly set huge areas o fire. Over the centuries the burning created an intricate ecosystem of fire-adapted plant species dependent on native pyrophilia. The current inhabitants of the Beni still burn, although now it is to maintain the savannah for cattle.

"When we flew over the area, the dry season had just begun, but mile-long lines of flame were already on the march. In the charred areas behind the fires were the blackened spikes of trees -- many of them, one assumes, of the varieties that activists fight to save in other parts of Amazonia.

"After we landed, I asked Balée, Should we let people keep burning the Beni? Or should we let the trees invade and create a verdant tropical forest in the grasslands, even if one had not existed here for millenia?

"Balée laughed. You're trying to trap me, aren't you? he said."


ONLINE INFO ON THIS TOPIC:

Professor William L. Balée, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.

wbalee@tulane.edu

Professor Clark Erickson, University of Pennsylvannia, website:

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/%7Ecerickso/



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