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When you imagine an environment that has been largely untouched by humans, the Amazon rainforest might come to mind. After all, most of this South American landscape is covered with dense vegetation, suggesting a corner of the world that humans never had control over. Here, there must have been no deforestation, no agricultural revolution, no cities. It seems like a pristine environment.
At least, that's what we thought. But a very different picture is emerging. Archaeologists working with indigenous communities are being shown the remains of crumbling cities, and remote sensing techniques such as lidar are revealing traces of vast ghost cities. With so much evidence of ancient human activity, it is believed that millions of people lived in the pre-Columbian Amazon, some of them in large urban centres complete with road networks, temples and pyramids.
But this study reveals more than that. It also provides evidence that, paradoxically, conventional views of the Amazon are not entirely off the mark. For example, although ancient Amazonians managed the land intensively, they did not deforest. And, although they developed complex societies, they never underwent a major agricultural revolution. This may suggest that pre-Columbian Amazonians broke the mold of human cultural development traditionally thought of as an inexorable progression from hunting and gathering to agriculture to urban complexity. The truth is more surprising. In fact, we are now coming to understand that there was no such mold. Civilizations arose in different ways. What seems like an anomaly in the Amazon is actually a shining example of a process as vibrant and diverse as the rainforest itself.
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Source: www.newscientist.com
