(Illustration Credit 9.2)
A second reason that slash-and-burn is required, Meggers told me, is the region’s propensity for suffering “mega-Niño events”—super-strong El Niño climate swings that occur every three hundred to five hundred years. In the archaeological record, she said, “We’re able to pick up severe droughts related to these mega-Niño events. What these did was reduce the food supply. The 1998 El Niño was a small example—they saw droughts, forest fires, and reduction of resources from when trees don’t flower.” Forest fires in the northern state of Roraima that year claimed such a huge area that Brazil requested aid from the United Nations. In the past, Meggers said, “the well-established groups that were sitting in one territory for several hundred years couldn’t survive [the droughts], so they broke up. We see this repeated at least four times in the last two millennia.” In other words, any Indians who tried to go beyond slash-and-burn to permanent cultivation would be knocked back to slash-and-burn by a mega-Niño. Slash-and-burn, she said, “avoids the risks, including the risk of growth—it’s the smart thing to do.”
Swidden, Meggers admitted, has a major drawback: it cannot yield enough to support a complex society. More intensive farming might produce the requisite surplus, but cannot be sustained; the plowed land, exposed to the elements, is destroyed in as little as a decade. Even with slash-and-burn, ecologists say, the forest can take as much as a hundred years to return completely to its previous state. European-style agriculture would not only fall victim to mega-Niños, it would permanently ruin the forest soils.
Carvajal therefore misunderstood what he saw, Meggers told me. Or else he had simply made up everything, and not just the Amazons. Caught in a lush, green trap, Indian villages could not possibly have grown as large as he reported—indeed, Meggers once proposed an upper limit of a thousand on their population. And the villages could not have been the sophisticated places he described, with their chiefly rulers, social classes, and specialized laborers (those military musicians on the Tapajós, for example). That was why archaeologists and anthropologists had come across the ruins of complex societies throughout Mesoamerica and the Andes, but saw only hunter-gatherers and slash-and-burners in Amazonia.
“The basic thing about the Amazon is that these people had a long-term period to learn about and experience and benefit from their knowledge of the environment,” Meggers said. “Any group that over-exploited their environment was going to be dead. The ones that survived, the knowledge got built into their ideology and behavior with taboos and other kinds of things.” Having reached the optimal cultural level for their environment, she explained, Amazon Indian lives changed little, if at all, for at least two thousand years.
As proof, Meggers pointed to Marajó, an island more than twice the size of New Jersey that sits like a gigantic stopper in the mouth of the Amazon. The island, low and often swampy, is created by the collision of the Amazon with the sea, which forces the river to disgorge dissolved sediments. Much of the island is submerged during the rainy season, and even in the dry summer pieces of the mazy shoreline are constantly calving off like icebergs and falling into the water. Yet despite the unpromising setting, the Marajóara created a sophisticated society there from about 800 to 1400 A.D.
Betty Meggers
(Illustration Credit 9.3)
The island’s pottery, some of it very large, has long been celebrated for its painted and incised representations of animals and plants, which are ornately entangled in a profusion that recalls the forest itself. The skillful pottery indicated that Marajó was a large-scale society—the only one then known in all of Amazonia. In the late 1940s Meggers and her husband, archaeologist Clifford J. Evans, decided to learn more.
The decision was ambitious. Archaeologists have traditionally avoided tropical forests, because the climate destroys all wood, cloth, and organic material—except for ceramics and stone, there is little left to dig up. And the Amazon basin, essentially an astoundingly large river valley made of deposited mud, has almost no stone, so archaeologists wouldn’t even find that. (Because the nearest deposits of metal ore were in the Andes, thousands of miles upstream, Amazonian peoples had no metal.)
At Marajó, Meggers and Evans soon noticed an oddity: the earliest traces of Marajóara culture were the most elaborate. As the centuries advanced, the quality of the ceramics inexorably declined. The designs became cruder, the repertoire of themes reduced, the technical skill diminished. At the beginning, some grave sites were more elaborate than others, a testament to social stratification. Later on, all the dead were treated in the same mundane way. Early in their history, the Marajóara must have sneered at the lowly cultures on their borders. But as the forest, in a process out of Heart of Darkness, stripped away the layers of civilization, they became indistinguishable from their neighbors. A hundred years before Columbus, Meggers told me, they were blasted by a mega-Niño and then overrun by one of their erstwhile inferiors. The history of Marajó was all fall and no rise.
In a boldly written article in American Anthropologist in 1954, Meggers proclaimed the implications:
There is a force at work to which man through his culture must bow. This determinant operates uniformly regardless of time, place (within the forest), psychology or race. Its leveling effect appears to be inescapable. Even modern efforts to implant civilization in the South American tropical forest have met with defeat, or survive only with constant assistance from the outside. In short, the environmental potential of the tropical forest is sufficient to allow the evolution of culture to proceed only to the level represented by [slash-and-burn farmers]; further indigenous evolution is impossible, and any more highly evolved culture attempting to settle and maintain itself in the tropical forest environment will inevitably decline to the [slash-and-burn] level.
The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of culture.” And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: “The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies.”
How did Marajó escape, even temporarily, the iron grasp of its environment? And why was there no sign of its initial climb past ecological limits, only of its subsequent collapse before them? Meggers and Evans provided the answers three years later in an influential monograph. Marajó, they said, was not actually an Amazonian society. In fact, it was a failed cutting from a more sophisticated culture in the Andes, a cousin of Wari or Tiwanaku. Stranded in the wet desert of the Amazon, the culture struggled to gain its footing, tottered a few steps, and died.
Counterfeit Paradise was the product of more than twenty years of research. But that was not the sole reason for the book’s influence. Meggers’s message of limitation, published within a year of the first Earth Day, resonated in the ears of readers newly converted to the ecological movement. Since then countless campaigns to save the rainforest have driven home its lesson: development in tropical forests destroys both forests and their developers. Promulgated in ecology textbooks, Meggers’s argument became a wellspring of the campaign to save rainforests, one of the few times in recent history that humankind has actually tried to profit from the lessons of the past.
Yet even as the themes of Counterfeit Paradise spread to the worlds of natural science and political activism, Meggers’s ideas exerted ever-diminishing influence in archaeology itself. From her distinguished post at the Smithsonian, she battled on behalf of the law of environmental limitation. But her main accomplishment may have been inadvertently to keep new ideas about Amazonian history from the public eye—ideas about its past that may, according to their advocates, play a role in safeguarding its future.
PAINTED ROCK CAVE
“Rather than admiration or enthusiasm,” the great Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, “the feeling that overtakes one when first encountering the Amazon is foremost one of disappointment.” Like t
oday’s ecotourism brochures, the accounts of the great river basin in da Cunha’s time celebrated its immensity but rarely dwelled on its extreme flatness—in the Amazon’s first 2,900 miles the vertical drop is only 500 feet. “It is as though the place lacks vertical lines,” da Cunha complained. “In a few hours the observer gives in to the fatigue of the unnatural monotony.” Every year the river floods—not a disaster, but a season. A channel that is one mile wide in the dry season can become thirty miles wide in the wet. After five months the water recedes, leaving behind a layer of rich sediment. From the air, the river seems to ooze like dirty metal through a wash of green utterly devoid of the romantic crags, arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most people of European descent.
The area around the lower-Amazon city of Santarém is an exception. West of town, the Tapajós pours into the Amazon from the south, creating an inland bay that at high water is fifteen miles wide and a hundred miles long. The flood rises high enough to cover low river islands in knee-deep water, leaving their trees to stand out like miracles in mid-channel. Fishers from town ride their bicycles into little boats, parking the bikes while working by hanging them in the offshore trees. The bay is lined with bluffs high enough to cast long shadows. Almost five hundred years ago, Indians lined the edge of the rise, taunting Orellana by waving palm fronds.
On the opposite, northern side of the river are a series of sandstone ridges that reach down from the Guiana Shield in the north, halting close to the water’s edge. Five hundred feet high and more, they rise above the canopy like old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes are splattered with ancient pictographs—rock paintings of hands, stars, frogs, and human figures, all reminiscent of Joan Miró, in overlapping red and yellow and brown. In the 1990s one of these caves, Caverna da Pedra Pintada—Painted Rock Cave—drew considerable attention in archaeological circles.
Wide and shallow and well lighted, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged with bats than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high and electric with gaudy imagery. Out front is a sunny natural patio, suitable for picnicking, that is edged by a few big rocks. During my visit I ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting stone and looked through a stand of peach palms over the treetops to the water seven miles away. The people who created the petroglyphs, I thought, must have done about the same thing.
Painted Rock Cave has attracted scientists since the mid-nineteenth century, when Alfred Russel Wallace visited it. Wallace, a naturalist, was more interested in the palm trees outside the caves than the people who had lived inside them. The latter were left to an archaeologist, Anna C. Roosevelt, then at the Field Museum. To her exasperation, press accounts of Roosevelt’s work often stress her descent from Theodore Roosevelt (she is his great-granddaughter), as if her lineage were more noteworthy than her accomplishments. In truth, though, she has demonstrated something of her ancestor’s flair for drama and controversy.
Roosevelt first came to public attention when she reexcavated Marajó in the 1980s. By using a battery of new remote-sensing techniques—including total-station topographic mapping, ground-penetrating radar, and scanning for slight variations in magnetic field strength, electrical conductivity, and electrical resistance—she was able to build up a picture of Marajó far more detailed than Meggers and Evans could have in the 1940s and 1950s, when they worked there. Detailed—and different.
Published in 1991, Roosevelt’s initial report on Marajó was like the antimatter version of Counterfeit Paradise. A few scientists had challenged Meggers’s ideas; Roosevelt excoriated them from top to bottom. Far from being a failed offshoot of another, higher culture, she concluded, Marajó was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World,” a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had “possibly well over 100,000” inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “large population, highly intensive subsistence, [and] major systems of public works” had improved it: the places formerly occupied by the Marajóara showed the most luxuriant and diverse growth. “If you listened to Meggers’s theory, these places should have been ruined,” Roosevelt told me.
Rather than pressing down on Marajó, she said, the river and forest opened up possibilities. In highland Mexico, “it wasn’t easy to get away from other people. With all those rocky hillsides and deserts, you couldn’t readily start over. But in the Amazon, you could run away—strike off in your canoe and be gone.”
As in Huckleberry Finn? I asked.
“If you like,” she said. “You could go [along the river] where you wanted and homestead—the forest gives you all kinds of fruit and animals, the river gives you fish and plants. That was very important to societies like Marajó. They had to be much less coercive, much more hang-loose, much more socially fluid, or people wouldn’t stay there.” Compared with much of the rest of the world at that time, people in the Amazon “were freer, they were healthier, they were living in a really wonderful civilization.”
In this reconstruction based on archaeologist Anna Roosevelt’s view of Marajóara society, houses cluster on artificial platforms above the wet ground while farm fields stretch into the island’s interior.
(Illustration Credit 9.4)
Anna Roosevelt
(Illustration Credit 9.5)
Marajó never had the grand public monuments of a Tenochtitlan or a Qosqo, Roosevelt noted, because its leaders “couldn’t compel the labor.” Nonetheless, she said, Marajó society was “just as orderly and beautiful and complex. The eye-opener was that you didn’t need a huge apparatus of state control to have all that. And this had been entirely missed by Meggers, who couldn’t see past her environmental-determinist theories. And I said so much in my book.”
Meggers reacted to Roosevelt’s critiques by sneering at her “polemical tone” and “extravagant claims.” In concluding that large areas of Marajó had been continuously inhabited, Roosevelt had (according to Meggers) committed the beginner’s error of confusing a site that had been occupied many times by small, unstable groups for a single, long-lasting society. Cultural remains, Meggers explained to me, “build up on areas of half a kilometer or so, because [shifting Indian groups] don’t land exactly on the same spot. The decorated types of pottery don’t change much over time, so you can pick up a bunch of chips and say, ‘Oh, look, it was all one big site!’ Unless you know what you’re doing, of course.” From her point of view, claiming that Amazonian societies could escape their environmental constraints was little more than a display of scientific ignorance, the archaeological version of trying to design perpetual-motion machines.
To Meggers’s critics, the ecological-limits argument was not only wrong, but familiar—and familiar in an uncomfortable way. From the first days of contact, Europeans have perceived the Indians of the tropics as living in timeless stasis. Michel de Montaigne admiringly claimed in 1580 that the inhabitants of the Amazon had “no knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior, no practice of subordination or of riches or poverty … no clothing, no agriculture, no metals.” They abided, he said, “without toil or travail” in a “bounteous” forest that “furnishes them abundantly with all they need.… They are still in that blessed state of desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities: for them anything further is merely superfluous.”
Montaigne’s successors quickly turned his views upside-down. Like him, they viewed Amazonians as existing outside history, but they now regarded this as a bad thing. The French natural historian Charles Marie de la Condamine retraced Orellana’s journey in 1743. He emerged with great regard for the forest—and none for its inhabitants. The peoples of the Peruvian Amazon were nothing more than “forest animals,” he said. “Before making them Christians, they must first be made human.” In softened form, Condamine’s views persisted into the twentieth century. “Where man has remained in the tropics, with few exceptions, he has suffered arr
ested development,” the prominent geographer Ellen Churchill Semple remarked in 1911. “His nursery has kept him a child.” To be sure, advocates of environmental limitations today do not endorse the racist views of the past, but they still regard the original inhabitants of the Amazon as trapped in their environment like flies in amber. Meggers’s “law of environmental limitation of culture,” her critics in essence say, is nothing but a green variant of Holmberg’s Mistake.
Over time, the Meggers-Roosevelt dispute grew bitter and personal; inevitable in a contemporary academic context, it featured charges of colonialism, elitism, and membership in the CIA. Particularly vexing to Meggers was that some of the same people who demanded minutely detailed proof for pre-Clovis sites had cheerfully accepted Roosevelt’s revisionism about Marajó. A big, prosperous city rising up on its own in the stifling Amazon forest? Meggers could not contain her disbelief. “I wish a psychologist would look into this,” she said to me.
Meanwhile, Roosevelt went on to Painted Rock Cave. On the cave floor what looked to me like nothing in particular turned out to be an ancient midden: a refuse heap. Roosevelt’s team slowly scraped away sediment, traveling backward in time with every inch. Even when the traces of human occupation ceased, they kept digging down. (“You always go a meter past sterile,” she told me.) A few inches below what she had thought would be the last layer of human habitation she hit another—a culture, Roosevelt said later, that wasn’t supposed to be there. It was as much as thirteen thousand years old.