The Land of Dark
Earth
by John Sweat
published: August
21, 2006
Francisco de Orellana was a
liar.
The Spanish conquistadors
surely must have cursed him as such in the decades that followed his
exploits in the Amazonian basin in 1541 AD. As expedition upon expedition
toiled through the jungle in search of el Dorado - nowhere was there to be
found the city "that stretched for 15 miles without any space from
house to house which was a marvellous thing to behold."1
Nor could they find the glistening white cities connected by raised
highways such as Orellana had described to the King of Spain. They found
nothing but scattered tribes living in a rainforest of immense size, with
trees of immense girth, thickly covered with creepers and vines. Any
attempt to penetrate into the forest met with disaster, the unstopping
rain rotted the clothes off their back, disease and sickness took a
disastrous toll upon the explorers.
Based on such reports,
the official historians agreed with the later reports. As early as 1552,
the historian Francisco Lopez de Gomara wrote that
Orellana's account was full of lies, especially the part about
encountering the mythical Amazons; women warriors who had fought at the
forefront against the Spanish invaders. Based on such critiques, even the
more tempered account of the Orellana expediation by Gaspar de Carvajal
(translation
here.) was considered dubious.
But it is now believed
that the Amazon basin once supported native cultures who were far more
advanced and agriculturally sufficient than previously understood. And
dedicated archaeologists are finding the evidence to support such a
claim.
Created ten million years
ago by tectonic shift in the Andes, the current Amazon River has over a
thousand tributaries over it's 4,000 mile length that meanders through the
world's largest rainforest, 2.7 million square miles in size.2
From the highlands of Perus to the Atlantic delta, the river swells out
its banks and over large areas of the forest during the rainy season,
countless lakes dot the landscape.
Beyond the impenetrable
thickets along the river banks and swamps that so frustrated the
Conquistadors, the forest floor is mostly clear of vegetation, enough to
support a population of wild pigs and deer. It is the canopy region of the
forest, 30-45 meters above the ground where the biodiversity is heaviest.
Here is where much of the animal population lives; birds, monkeys, cats
and insects.
The Amazon was left for
the most part undisturbed till modern times. The native people of the
region were considered to be untouched by civilization, with the
rainforest unable to support any kind of agricultural base even with the
use of modern methods. The constant rainfall and heat accelerate the rate
of decay, preventing the necessary accumulation of humus. Other detriments
to agriculture are the concentrations of iron and aluminum oxides in the
soil.
Humans settled in the
Amazon as they did throughout the Americas, though at what date cannot be
determined.While the Andean cultures were busy building their pyramids and
temples, the settlers of the rainforest made their own
attempts.
For example near the
Brazilian border with French Guyana the remnants of an ancient monument
have been discovered, evoking comparisons to Stonehenge. In an open field
(or grassy hilltop - depending on the account), over a hundred blocks of
granites, each 3 meters high are evenly spaced in a circle.
The alignment of the
blocks "with the winter solstice ... leads us to believe the site was once
an astronomical observatory,'' said Mariana Petry Cabral, an archaeologist
at the Amapa State Scientific and Technical Research Institute, as
reported by Stan Lehman of the Associated Press. "We may be also
looking at the remnants of a sophisticated
culture."3
Then there are the
disputed finds at Marajo, an island the size of Switzerland, at the mouth
of the Amazon. Anna Roosevelt, known for her work at Pedra Pintada claimed
to have discovered a complex society that built a series of large
earthworks to enhance the agricultural ability sometime during the first
millenium AD. She also claimed to have found pottery fragments from around
5000 BC close by. Her critics, such as William Barse state that
Roosevelt's "excavations and interpretations based on them are
problematical." 4
The resistance to
Roosevelt's findings at Pedra Pintada highlight the controversy
surrounding the idea that the Amazon had indigenous cultures that were
able to sustain a high population base and develop sophisticated cultures.
Environmentalist are not exactly enchanted with the notion that the
"untouched" Amazon basin may show anthropogenic influences and when the
following researcher presented his finding at the Field Museum of Chicago
he claimed that detractors were "literally yelling at me" in
opposition to the new claims and research being
done.
That researcher is Clark
Erickson. As an undergraduate, Erickson spent two summers working on digs
at Lake Titicaca. But it wasn't till he was literally leaving the site
where he had started his archaeological career that he noticed (from the
rear view mirror of a Vokswagen bus) an unusual and extensive crosshatch
patterns in the landscape.
What he had seen became
an obsession, and he started to collect aerial and satellite images of the
Amazon basin, especially the Baures region in Bolivia. From these he
started to note what appeared to be hills or mounds (analogous to the
tells of Mesopotamia), some of them over 60 feet in height rising
above the savanna of the Baures region of the Amazon. Closer observation
showed that causeways, straight as rulers had once connected the mounds -
ancient settlements of up to 1,000 inhabitants.5
It is not only the Baures
region that has been shown to have had extensive human activity.
Heckenberger and Stockstad in 2003 duplicated Erikson's feat and
discovered deep in the Amazon region of the Xingu "a highly planned
network of villages, with canals, artificial ponds, very straight roads up
to 50 m wide with meter-high curbs, and even large defensive moats,
bridges, and plazas. The research team found 19 villages originating
perhaps in late first millennium A.D. linked to smaller settlements with
extensive road networks."6
It appears that similar
structures are being found in Venezuala also, though the research there
has barely begun.
With proof of human of
dense human habitation everywhere throughout the Amazon being discovered
almost daily, there are questions that need to be
answered.
How were these cultures
able to establish themselves in a region where modern agricultural methods
fail?
Anyone familiar with the
square foot gardening methods of Mel Bartholemew will know gardening can
easily be made more efficient and manageable than modern, large scale
methods that emphasize chemicals and machinery. The Amazonian farmers went
further; developing raised fields over a half mile long with irrigation
canals in between. When tested, the farming methods was three to four
times more effective than the slash and burn method now being
used.
However, there is still
the question of how they managed to develop such fields without them being
leeched of essential nutrients from the continuous rainfall? Here is
where the Amazonians did something revolutionary and still not fully
understood.
They created terra
preta. Dark earth. Somehow they found a method to enrich the soil with
a microorganism that creates a dark, loamy strata with potting-soil like
qualities. Even more amazing, the soil regenerates year after year - never
becoming depleted. Up to 10% of the Amazon basin has been terraformed in
such a manner by the ancients - an area the size of France. 7
But then what happened to
these people in the wake of Orellan's expedition? Was the introduction of
European disease a factor in their abrupt demise? Or did the Amazonians
fall victim to something else?
Orellana's expedition was
in 1541, but by 1552 we already have first-hand reports that the Amazon
was not inhabited as described by Orellana and Carvajal. For an
explanation we need to turn to Mexico and
Peru.
In the February 2006
issue of Discover magazine, a new hypothesis was presented, quite
at odds with the conventional knowledge. As described by epidemiologist
Rudolfo Acuna-Soto, there were recorded outbreaks of a hemorrhagic
disease, whose symptoms were unlike smallpox or any other known European
disease. The Aztecs called it
cocolitzli.
"For them (Aztecs) it
was something completely different and far more virulent... it brought
incomparable devastation that passed from one region to the next and
killed quickly." 8
Orellana was originally
part of a larger expedition led by Cortez. As they descended from the
Andes they brought with them a large supply train of Peruvian Indians,
Indians who were already infected with the cocolitzli strain.
It can be conjectured
then, that the great outbreak of cocolitzli that swept the entire
American continent in 1545, was also responsible for the death and
disappearance of the Amazonian peoples.
Footnotes
