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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.

Painted Rock Cave was occupied at roughly the same time that the Clovis culture was thriving to the north. But Amazon paleo-Indians didn’t live in the same way as their northern counterparts, Roosevelt said. They didn’t make or use Clovis points. They didn’t hunt big game (almost none exists in the Amazon). Instead they plucked wild fruits from the forest, painted handprints on the walls, and ate the Amazon’s 1,500 species of fish, especially the 500-pound piraruçu, the world’s biggest freshwater fish. And then, after 1,200 years, these early people left the cave for good.

Painted Rock Cave became inhabited again in about 6000
B.C.
Probably it was no more than temporary shelter, a refuge when floodwaters got too high. People could have brought in loads of turtles and shellfish, built a fire in the shelter of the cave, and enjoyed the feel of dry land. In any case these people—Roosevelt called them the Paituna culture, after a nearby village—had ceramic bowls, red- to gray-brown. Found at Painted Rock Cave and other places in the area, it is the oldest known pottery in the Americas.

And so there were two occupations: one very old, with ceramics; the other even older, without them. To Roosevelt, the first settlement of Painted Rock Cave demonstrated that the Amazon forest was not settled by a copy or offshoot of Clovis. This early culture was a separate entity—another nail in the coffin of the Clovis-as-template theory, to her way of thinking. The second occupation, with its early and apparently independent development of ceramics, demonstrated something equally vital: Amazonia was not a dead end where the environment ineluctably strangled cultures in their cradles. It was a source of social and technological innovation of continental importance.

By about four thousand years ago the Indians of the lower Amazon were growing crops—at least 138 of them, according to a recent tally. The staple then as now was manioc (or cassava, as it is sometimes called), a hefty root that Brazilians roast, chop, fry, ferment, and grind into an amazing variety of foods. To this day, no riverside table is complete without a bowl of
farofa:
crunchy, toasted manioc meal, vaguely resembling grated Parmesan cheese, which Amazonians sprinkle on their food with abandon. To farmers, manioc has a wonderful advantage: it can grow practically anywhere, in any conditions. In Santarém I met a woman who told me that the asphalt street in front of her home had just been ripped up by the municipal authorities. Underneath the pavement, which had been laid down years before, was a crop of manioc.

Manioc has always been
the
Amazonian staple. To this day, it is ubiquitous in the slash-and-burn plots that surround every riverside hamlet. These little, shifting farms look like unchanged remnants of the past. But that idea apparently is mistaken. Rather than being the timeless indigenous adaptation portrayed in ecology textbooks, many archaeologists now view slash-and-burn agriculture as a relatively modern technique whose spread was driven by European technology. The main reason is the stone ax.

Living in the world’s thickest forest, the inhabitants of the Amazon basin had to remove a lot of trees if they wanted to accomplish practically anything. For this task the stone ax was their basic tool. Unfortunately, stone axes are truly wretched tools. With a stone ax, one does not so much cut down a tree as use the ax to beat a section of the trunk to pulp, weakening the base until the tree can no longer support itself. In the outskirts of the central Amazonian city of Manaus, a researcher let me whack at a big Brazil nut tree with a locally made replica of a traditional stone ax. After repeated blows I had created a tiny dent in the cylindrical wall of the bole. It was like attacking a continent. “Those things suck,” the researcher said, shaking his head.

In the 1970s Robert Carneiro, of the American Museum of Natural History, measured the labor required to clear a field before the advent of steel. He set people to work with stone axes in thickly forested parts of Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela. Many of the trees were four feet in diameter or more. In Carneiro’s experiments, felling a single four-foot tree with an indigenous stone ax took
115 hours—
nearly three weeks of eight-hour days. With a steel ax, his workers toppled trees of similar size in less than three hours. Carneiro’s team used stone axes to clear about an acre and a half, a typical slash-and-burn plot, in the equivalent of 153 eight-hour days. Steel axes did the job in the equivalent of eight workdays—almost twenty times faster. According to surveys by Stephen Beckerman, an anthropologist at Pennsylvania State University, Amazonian slash-and-burners are able to work their plots for an average of three years before they are overwhelmed. Given that farmers also must hunt, forage, build houses and trails, maintain their existing gardens, and perform a hundred other tasks, Carneiro wondered how they could have been able to spend months on end banging on trees to clear new fields every three years.

Unsurprisingly, people with stone implements wanted metal tools as soon as they encountered them—the prospective reduction in workload was staggering. When Columbus landed, according to William Balée, the Yanomamo lived in settled villages in the Amazon basin. Battered by European diseases and slave raiding, many fled to the Orinoco, becoming wandering foragers. In the seventeenth century they acquired steel tools, and used them to make the return journey from seminomadic hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists who lived in more or less permanent villages. So precious did European axes become during this time, according to Brian Ferguson, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, that when a source appeared the Yanomami would relocate whole villages to be near it. Steel tools, he told me, “had a major, transformative effect on all the trade and marriage relations in a whole area. They led to new trade networks, they led to new political alliances, they even led to war.” Researchers have often described the Yanomamo as “fierce,” aggressive sorts whose small villages are constantly at violent odds with one another. In Ferguson’s estimation, one cause of the endemic conflict observed by Western anthropologists and missionaries was the anthropologists and missionaries themselves, who gave their subjects “literally boatloads” of steel tools—axes, hatchets, machetes—to ingratiate themselves. At a stroke, the village hosting the Westerners would gleam with wealth; its neighbors would seek a share of the undeserved bounty; conflict would explode. “Steel to the Yanomamo was like gold for the Spanish,” Ferguson said. “It could push fairly ordinary people to do things that they wouldn’t consider doing otherwise.” (The anthropologists and missionaries there vehemently deny Ferguson’s claims. But so far as I am aware they did not call his scenario impossible. Rather, they said that to avoid unhappy consequences they had carefully controlled the amount of gift giving.)

Metal tools largely created slash-and-burn agriculture, William M. Denevan, the Wisconsin geographer, told me. “This picture of swidden as this ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in a timeless balance with Nature—that is mostly or entirely a myth, I think. At least there’s no evidence for it, and a fair amount of evidence against it, including the evidence of simple logic.” Slash-and-burn, supposedly a quintessentially Amazonian trait, “is a modern intrusion.”

A similar phenomenon seems to have taken place in North America, where Indians were widely said to have practiced slash-and-burn as part of their habit of living lightly on the land. Dismissing the data to back up these claims as “gossamer,” the geographer William E. Doolittle of the University of Texas noted in 2000 that most colonial accounts showed Indians clearing their fields permanently, even ripping stumps out to prevent them from sprouting. “Once fields were cleared, the intent was to cultivate them permanently, or at least for very long periods of time.” As populations rose, “farmers cleared new fields from the remaining forests.” Slash-and-burn was a product of European axes—and European diseases, which so shrank Indian groups that they adopted this less laborious but also less productive method of agriculture.

In the Amazon, the turn to swidden was unfortunate. Slash-and-burn cultivation has become one of the driving forces behind the loss of tropical forest. Although swidden does permit the forest to regrow, it is wildly inefficient and environmentally unsound. The burning sends up in smoke most of the nutrients in the vegetation—almost all of the nitrogen and half the phosphorus and potassium. At the same time, it pours huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the air, a factor in global warming. (Large cattle ranches are the major offenders in the Amazon, but small-scale farmers are responsible for up to a third of the clearing.) Fortunately, it is a relatively new practice, which means it has not yet had much time to cause damage. More important, the very existence of so much healthy forest after twelve thousand years of use by large populations suggests that whatever Indians did
before
swidden must have been ecologically more sustainable.

RAINDROP PHYSICS

The papaya orchard was so robust and healthy that it looked like an advertisement—the background image behind a celebrity endorser of a new papaya drink. Sweating in the equatorial sun, some of the researchers admiringly fingered the plump, pendulous green fruit, each the size of a baby’s head, wrapped in clusters around the trees’ sturdy trunks. Other scientists bent down and with equal approbation scooped up handfuls of dirt. The road to the plantation had been cut into the Amazon’s famously poor soil—it was the blaring orangered of cheap makeup, almost surreally bright against the great dark green leaves of the forest. But in the shade of the papaya trees the soil was dark brown, with the moist, friable feel that gardeners seek.

At first glance, the soil seemed similar to what one would find in, say, the grain belts of North America or Europe. After a more careful inspection, though, it looked entirely different, because it was full of broken ceramics. The combination of good soil, successful agriculture, and evidence of past Indian inhabitation was what had brought the scientists to the farm. I had been invited to tag along.

The orchard was about a thousand miles up the Amazon, two hours by ferry and bus from Manaus. Manaus, the biggest city on the river, is situated on the north bank of the Amazon, hard by its junction with the Negro River, a major tributary.
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Between the two rivers is a tongue of land that, depending on your point of view, is either almost destroyed by development or quite lightly inhabited considering its proximity to a city of a million people. Near the tip of the tongue is the small village of Iranduba: a bush-pilot airport, a half-dozen lackadaisical stores, some bars with jukeboxes loud enough to knock birds from the trees, and docks for loading local farmers’ produce. A few miles outside Iranduba, on a bluff above the Amazon, stood the papaya orchard. It was one of the many small riverside farms operated by the descendants of Japanese immigrants.

In 1994 Michael Heckenberger, now at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and James B. Petersen, now at the University of Vermont in Burlington, decided to look for potential archaeological sites in the central Amazon. With a team of Brazilian scientists, Meggers had surveyed much of the river and its tributaries in the 1970s and 1980s and concluded there was little of archaeological relevance—further proof of the inescapability of ecological constraints. Believing that Meggers’s survey had been too coarse-grained, Heckenberger and Petersen decided to search a single area intensively. Joined by Eduardo Goés Neves of the University of São Paulo, several dozen of Neves’s students, and, later, Robert N. Bartone, of the University of Maine at Farmington, they found more than thirty sites at the Amazon-Negro junction, four of which they excavated fully. The papaya farm was one of the four. Now Neves, Petersen, and Bartone were leading a score of visiting researchers and a journalist on a tour of the site.

From the shade of a doorway, the father of the family watched us mill around with a tolerant smile. A teenage girl stood outside, listlessly sweeping at a cloud of yellow butterflies. Through the loosely placed boards in the wall floated the bark and jabber of a talk-radio show about the latest soccer perfidy from Argentina, Brazil’s hated rival. Although it was winter, the midday sun was hot enough to make sweat start out from the skin.

At the edge of the papaya grove were ten low earthen mounds that the team had identified as human-made. Carbon dating indicated that they were constructed in about 1000
A.D.
The archaeologists had begun opening up the largest of the mounds. Already they had discovered nine burials, one body placed in a big funerary urn, all apparently interred at the same time. Because the scientists were unlikely to have uncovered the area’s only concentration of human remains in their first, exploratory test pit, they believed that the entire mound was likely to be full of burials—hundreds of them. “That suggests thousands of people lived here,” Neves said. “In 1000
A.D.,
that’s a big place.”