1491 (75 page)

 

Sky Witness: Martin and Grube 2000:90–92, 102–04.

 

Mutal size and population: Adams and Jones 1981:318–19; Culbert et al. 1990 (arguing for 425,000 as total size).

 

Possible motives for Kaan-Mutal war: Fahsen 2003 (trade routes); Harrison 1999:121 (commerce, dynasty); Grube, pers. comm. (ideology).

 

Landscape alteration: The literature is vast. Examples include Darch 1988; Dunning et al. 2002; Fedick and Ford 1990; Gunn et al. 2002 (“geochemically hostile,” 313); Scarborough and Gallopin 1991; Sluyter 1994. See also, Scarborough 2003.

 

Oxwitza’ (Caracol): Chase and Chase 2001, 1996, 1994 (population, 5).

 

Star Wars
attack on Mutal: Harrison 1999:122; Houston 1991; Freidel 1993. The Chases are skeptical of Kaan’s role, because they think it too far from Caracol and because they are skeptical about the translations by Grube and Martin (Chase and Chase 2000:63).

 

Maya way of conquest: Grube and Martin 1998.

 

Dos Pilas: Guenter 2003; Fahsen 2003. Previous attempts at decipherment include Boot 2002a, 2002b; better readings of the glyphs led to corrections. See also, Guenter 2002; Williams 2002.

 

Stairway quotes: Guenter 2002:39 (flint), 27 (skull).

 

Morley’s tally of dates: Morley 1946:64. Updated in Sidrys and Berger 1979; Hamblin and Pitcher 1980. I use Sidrys and Berger. A few hard-to-read inscriptions might have been set down as late as 928.

 

Four lines of evidence: Robichaux 2002 (waterflow evidence); Gill 2000 (ethnohistorical [Gill also uses many other types of data]; “starvation and thirst,” 1); Curtis, Hodell, and Brenner 1996 (oxygen data; “driest intervals,” 45); Haug et al. 2003 (titanium).

 

Paradoxical survival in the north: Dahlin 2002 (“How and why,” 327); Robichaux 2002. The Maya also fled west, toward Guatemala’s Pacific coast, another dry area in which they thrived during the drought. I leave the western cities out of the main account solely for simplicity.

 

Chichén Itzá: Milbrath and Peraza Lope 2003.

 

9 /
Amazonia

Orellana’s expedition: The main sources are collected in Heaton ed. 1934 (“by God,” 262). The best histories of the expedition that I have come across are Smith 1990:chap. 2; Hemming 1987:185–94. Still enjoyable to read, though dated, is Prescott 2000 (“Not a bark,” 1075).

 

Orellana’s betrayal: The case for the prosecution is summed up in Means 1934. For Pizarro’s reaction, see letter, Pizarro, G., to king, 3 Sept. 1542, in Heaton 1934:245–51 (“the greatest cruelty,” 248).

 

“We were eating”: Heaton ed. 1934:408.

 

Angry hives: I have borrowed the simile from Smith 1990:68. The next two sentences are essentially reworkings of his sentences.

 

Carvajal on populousness, Tapajós attacks: Heaton 1934 (“farther we went,” 202; “all inhabited,” “five leagues,” 198; “numerous and very large,” 200; “Inland,” 216; “more than twenty,” 203).

 

Carvajal publication: Medina ed. 1894.

 

Carvajal criticism: López de Gómara 1979:131 (“
mentirosa
”); Myers et al. 1992; Denevan 1996a:661–64; see also, Shoumatoff 1986. Oddly, critics rarely mention that Orellana’s account is similar to those from the second Amazon expedition. This was the Pedro de Orsua expedition of 1559–61, subject of the Werner Herzog film
Aguirre, the Wrath of God.
The basic sources are collected in González and Tur eds. 1981. It stopped at the Tapajós in 1561, but provided little further information about the region, except for the suggestive fact that the Indian towns’ streets were laid out in a grid and that they had wooden temples with deities painted on the doors (González and Tur eds. 1981:111, 370).

 

Ecologists’ views: Arnold 2000. For how they fit into the general Western propensity to view the Amazon as a tropical Eden, see Holanda 1996; Slater 1995; and the polemical Stott 1999. German ecologist Andreas Schimper invented “tropical rain forest” as a scientific construct in 1898 (Schimper 1903). It was an example of a new scientific category that included the living community and its nonliving environment together as a single functioning unit—an ecosystem, a term Schimper’s school coined in 1935.

 

More sympathetic views of Carvajal: Author’s intervews, Balée, Erickson, Peter Stahl, Anna Roosevelt. See also, Porro 1994, Whitehead 1994, for contemporary treatments of early accounts.

 

Must become priority: E.g., “The time bomb of ecological, environmental, climatic and human damage caused by deforestation continues to tick, and the problem of tropical rainforest clearance must remain a priority within international politics” (Park 1992:162).

 

“A ceaseless round”: Belt 1985:184; Darwin ed. 1887 (vol. 3):188 (“best of all”).

 

Richards: Richards 1952. Richards’s ideas drew heavily on the idea of the natural progression of ecosystems toward a final, stable “climax” developed by ecologists Frederick E. Clements and Arthur George Tansley. In this view, the tropical forest was the climax, the ultimate vegetative destination, in hot, humid areas.

 

“wet desert”: The image of the Amazon as a lush forest growing on a desert was apparently popularized in Goodland and Irwin 1975.

 

Rainforest soils: This argument is crisply stated in Wilson 1992:273–74.

 

Counterfeit Paradise:
Meggers 1996 (orig. ed., 1971).

 

Slash-and-burn as ecologically sensitive response: Interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1996: 20–23. See also, Kleinman, Bryant, and Pimentel 1996; Luna-Orea and Wagger 1996.

 

Unchanged harmony: “In the Western imagination, more generally speaking, the Amazon has stood for centuries as the benchmark of primordial (pure) nature and as a refuge of ‘primitive’ peoples: our contemporary ancestors” (Heckenberger, forthcoming).

 

Yanomamo as windows into the past: E.g., Brooke 1991 (“a tribe virtually untouched by modern civilization whose ways date from the Stone Age”); Chagnon 1992. In the foreword to the latter, Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson calls the Yanomamo “the final tribes living strong and free in the style of the preliterate peoples first encountered by Europeans five centuries ago.” To Wilson, “the Yanomamö way of life gives us the clearest view of the conditions under which the human mind evolved biologically during deep history”(ix).

 

“mega-Niño events”: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1994; 1979 (other climatic constraints).

 

El Niño fires: Cochrane and Schulze 1998; Pyne 1995:60–65. Fires from a big El Niño in 1925–26 were described in a short, apparently self-published monograph by Giuseppe Marchesi (Marchesi 1975) that I found in a used-book store in Manaus. According to Marchesi, the fires on the Río Negro were so intense that the smoke blocked out the sun in Manaus, hundreds of miles away.

 

Recovery time of forest: Uhl 1987; Uhl and Jordan 1984; Uhl et al. 1982.

 

Upper limit of a thousand: Meggers (1954) says that the rainforest will not permit societies to surpass the “Tropical Forest” pattern of slash-and-burn subsistence (809), which she defines as “villages of 50–1,000 pop[ulation]” (814, fig. 1). The implication is that environmental limits set the maximum village population at one thousand.

 

Meggers dismisses Carvajal: Meggers 1996:187 (“Evidence [of environmental limits] casts doubt on the accuracy of the early European descriptions of large sedentary populations along the floodplain”). Oddly, Meggers endorsed Carvajal in the same book (“These eyewitness reports of numerous large villages are substantiated by archaeological evidence,” 133). See also, Meggers 1992a, 1992c.

 

Unchanged lives, population: Meggers 1992 (two thousand years, 199).

 

Meggers and Marajó: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Popsin 2003; Meggers and Evans 1957. See also Schaan 2004.

 

Meggers’s law: Meggers 1954 (“There is a force,” 809; “
level to which,
” 815). Meggers called the stage of slash-and-burn cultivation the “Tropical Forest” pattern. In the brackets, I have replaced references to that term. Her law drew on the environmental-determinist arguments of earlier geographers such as Ellen Churchill Semple, whose
Influences of Geographic Environment
trained two generations of researchers: “The geographic element in the long history of human development has been operating strongly and operating persistently…[and] is for all intents and purposes immutable in comparison with the other factor in the problem—shifting, plastic, progressive, retrogressive man” (Semple 1911:2).

 

Marajó as offshoot: Meggers and Evans 1957:412–18. See also, Evans and Meggers 1968. Meggers and Evans were influenced by Julian Steward, editor of the influential
Handbook of South American Indians,
who also thought that Marajóara culture originated somewhere else—the Caribbean, he suspected (Steward 1948).

 

Diminishing influence: “Few contemporary scholars accept the hypothesis of environmental limitations and lack of cultural development in the Amazon Basin” (Erickson 2004:457).

 

“Rather than admiration”: Cunha 1975:1. I thank Susanna Hecht for letting me use her translation, which is from her forthcoming compilation of da Cunha’s Amazonian writings. In the meantime, the original version of this marvelous book can be found at http://www.librairie.hpg.com.br/Euclides-da-Cunha-A-Margem-da-Historia.rtf.

 

Not a disaster: I paraphrase anthropologist Roland Bergman (Bergman 1980:53, quoted in Denevan 2001:60).

 

Rock paintings: Author’s visit; Consens 1989.

 

Roosevelt reexcavates: Author’s interviews, Roosevelt; Roosevelt 1991 (“outstanding indigenous,” 29; “100,000,” 2).

 

Earlier challenges to Meggers: Author’s interviews, Balée, Denevan, Erickson, Peter Stahl, Woods. Donald Lathrap of the University of Illinois (1970), Michael Coe of Yale (1957), and Robert L. Carneiro of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City (1995, see refs.) mounted the most important ones.

 

Meggers reaction: Author’s interviews, Meggers; Meggers 1992b (“polemical,” 399; “extravagant,” 403). See also Meggers 2004, 2001.

 

Montaigne: Montaigne 1991:233–36.

 

“forest animals”: Condamine 1986, quoted in Myers et al. 2004:22.

 

“Where man has remained”: Semple 1911:635. The ideas in
Influences of Geographic Environment
were typical for their day. “The Amazon winds its slow way amid the malarious languor of vast tropical forests in which the trees shut out the sky and the few natives are apathetic with the eternal inertia of the hot, damp tropics,” Semple’s Yale contemporary, Ellsworth Huntington, wrote in 1919 (Huntington 1919:49). “It is generally agreed,” Huntington said, “the native races within the tropics are dull in thought and slow in action. This is true not only of the African Negroes, the South American Indians, and the people of the East Indies, but of the inhabitants of southern India and the Malay peninsula” (Huntington 1924:56). See also, Taylor 1927.

 

Meggers-Roosevelt dispute: Author’s interviews, Meggers, Roosevelt, Balée, Denevan, Erickson; Meggers 1992a:37 (colonialism, elitism); Baffi et al. 1996 (CIA membership).

 

Painted Rock Cave excavations: Roosevelt et al. 1996; Fiedel et al. 1996; Haynes et al. 1997. Press coverage was unusually thorough. (Gibbons 1996; Wilford 1997a; Hall 1996). In
Science,
Roosevelt presented her estimate of initial occupation as [.similar]11,200 to 10,500 uncalibrated radiocarbon years
B.P.
(380); I converted the mean, 10,600
B.P.,
into calendar years with Stuiver et al. 1998.

 

Contemporaneity with Clovis: This is subject to debate, with Clovis-firsters challenging Roosevelt’s earliest radiocarbon dates, and Roosevelt crying foul because (in her view) the Clovisites apply more stringent standards to challengers than they do to Clovis (Haynes et al. 1997). Further confusing the issue is the participants’ disagreement over the best way of calibrating raw radiocarbon dates from this period.

 

138 crops: Clement 1999a, 1999b.

 

Stone axes: Author’s interviews, Denevan; Denevan 1992b. I am grateful to Prof. Denevan for sending me a copy of this article, upon which my discussion of stone axes is based. See also the updated version of the argument in Denevan 2001:116–23. To some extent, Denevan was anticipated by Donald Lathrap, who called slash-and-burn “a secondary, derived, and late phenomenon within the Amazon Basin,” which only made economic sense after the introduction of maize (quoted in ibid.:132). Denevan argued for a much later, post-1492 introduction of slash-and-burn.

 

Experiments with stone and steel axes: Carneiro 1979a, 1979b; Hill and Kaplan 1989 (difference between hardwoods and softwoods). True, Carneiro’s workers had no experience with stone axes, which one assumes unfairly magnified their inefficiency. But Carneiro also did not include the effort required to obtain the stone (often far away), make the ax, and keep it sharp, all of which were time sinks. Girdling, too, has been suggested, but it is also very slow.

 

Three years: Beckerman 1987. I thank Prof. Brush for helping me get this book.

 

Yanomamo history: Author’s interviews, Balée, Petersen, Chagnon.

 

Yanomami and steel tools: Author’s interview, Ferguson; Ferguson 1998 (lifestyle changes, 291–97), 1995; Colchester 1984 (seventeenth-century change, 308–10). Ferguson’s thesis is disputed, in part because it downplays the antiquity of Yanomamo warfare (author’s interview, James Petersen).

 

Controversy on Yanomami gifts: These and other charges were publicized and amplified in Tierney 2000. Tierney’s charges of exacerbating epidemics seem to have been refuted (see note to p. 102), but the furor over them obscured discussion of uncontrolled gifts of steel tools (Mann 2001, 2000a).

 

Absence of slash-and-burn in North America: Doolittle 2000:174–90 (“gossamer,” 186; “once fields,” 189).

 

Small farmer slash-and-burn as contributor to deforestation: Author’s interviews, Clement, Fearnside; Fearnside 2001. Fearnside’s figure is a step down from the estimate that slash-and-burn was responsible for 55 percent of total tropical forest clearing in the Americas in Hadley and Lanly 1983.

 

Nutrient loss: Hölscher 1997. I thank Beata Madari for giving a copy of this article to me.

 

Meggers survey: Meggers et al. 1988; Meggers 1996:183–87.

 

Central Amazon archaeology: Author’s interviews, Bartone, Heckenberger, Neves, Petersen; Heckenberger, Petersen, and Neves 2004; Neves et al. 2004; Mann 2002a. I convert uncalibrated radiocarbon years as per Stuiver et al.1988. The site discussed here is called Hatahara, after its owners.

 

Rainfall and canopy: Brandt 1988.

 

Importance of agroforestry: Interviews, Clement. See also, Denevan 2001:69–70, 83–90, 126–27; Posey 1984; Herrera 1992.

 

Bluffs as preferred sites: Denevan 1996.

 

More than half are trees: Clement 1998 (80 percent); 1999a:199. I am grateful to Dr. Clement for sending me copies of his work.