Kuhikugu, known to archaeologists as site X11, is the largest pre-Columbian town yet discovered in the Xingu region of the Amazon. It housed 1,000 or more people and served as the hub of a network of smaller towns.
Image: Luigi Marini
In Brief
- To most people, the Amazon forest is the quintessential case of pure nature slowly being destroyed as humans intrude.
- In fact, what seems pristine has itself been shaped by humans. In some areas the forest is secondary growth that took hold when native peoples were wiped out by their encounters with Europeans. The author and his colleagues have found extensive pre-Columbian ruins. Communities had a self-similar or fractal structure in which houses, settlements and clusters of settlements were organized in similar ways.
- Thus, the history of the Amazon is rather more interesting than usually thought. The environmental challenge is not only to preserve unspoiled wilderness but also to recover the techniques of sustainable farming and forestry that the ancestors of the region’s present inhabitants developed.
When Brazil established the Xingu Indigenous Park in 1961, the reserve was far from modern civilization, nestled deep in the southern reaches of the vast Amazon forest. When I first went to live with the Kuikuro, one of the reserve’s principal indigenous groups, in 1992, the park’s boundaries were still largely hidden in thick forest, little more than lines on a map. Today the park is surrounded by a patchwork of farmland, its borders often marked by a wall of trees. For many outsiders, this towering green threshold is a portal, like the massive gates of Jurassic Park, between the present—the dynamic modern world of soy fields, irrigation systems and 18-wheelers—and the past, a timeless world of primordial nature and society.
Long before taking center stage in the world’s environmental crisis as the giant green jewel of global ecology, the Amazon held a special place in the Western imagination. Mere mention of its name conjures images of dripping, vegetation-choked jungles; cryptic, colorful and often dangerous wildlife; endlessly convoluted river networks; and Stone Age tribes. To Westerners, Amazonian peoples are quintessential simple societies, small groups that merely make do with what nature provides. They have complex knowledge about the natural world but lack the hallmarks of civilization: centralized government, urban settlements and economic production beyond subsistence. In 1690 John Locke famously proclaimed, “In the beginning all the World was America.” More than three centuries later the Amazon still grips the popular imagination as nature at its purest, home to native peoples who, in the words of Rolling Stone editor Sean Woods in October 2007, preserve “a way of life unchanged since the dawn of time.”
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5 Comments
Add CommentFriends , each new day I have the pleasure to measure my progressive ignorance. Just have in mind that all civilizations suffered dramatic changes in the last 10 000 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAll civilizations? Not exactly, the local tribes in Brazil, as the ianomani, keep their ways of behave for at last 10 000 years.The ruins in the jungle show much more, and each new discover is amazing.
Research more!
The primordial Amazon rain forest is 500 years old and must be saved. According to the first spanish explorers of the early 1500's the area was heavily populated with farms, villages and cities. Within 150 years it was untouched primeval wilderness.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomehow the older I get and the more I know, the less sense educated people make.
The name Amazon was given to the river because Francisco Orellana (1540 or so) , departing from the Andes (now Peru) exploring downstream the enormous mass of water was attacked by Icamiabas indians that he identified (rightly or by mistake) as ferocious women fighters.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen, back to Spain, he reported his adventure to the king, Carlos associated those women to the Amazons of the Mythology , and baptized the river, the region and ...1500 years later, the online Bezos bookstore...
But, the rain forest was not a brandnew Botanical Garden at that time. And the area was far to be heavely populated.
The older I get, the bigger I see that my ignorance expands each time I research any area of my former knowledge. And I am sure, I am not alone...
Having recently learned that bacterial cell counts in our bodies outnumber those of human cells, imagine how knowledge of quarantine may have saved many aboriginal lives across the Americas when the proud europeans arrived. Archaeological forensics may indeed teach us some humility about our "apocalyptic" or "terminator"-like behaviour stemming from our social inertia of conquest to rule. Here is an opportunity to re-examine the broken links from our survival code a.k.a. folkloric wisdom. A wild animal enters the hub, is it offered a controlled opportunity to escape and to communicate?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Heckenberger: How do your fascinating discoveries relate to those made a few decades ago by Anna Roosevelt?
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