David Cleary Source: Latin American Research Review, Vol

Towards an Environmental History of the Amazon: From Prehistory to the Nineteenth Century

Author(s): David Cleary Source: Latin American Research Review, Vol. 36, No. 2 (2001), pp. 64-96 Published by: The Latin American Studies Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2692088 Accessed: 11-07-2015 18:27 UTC

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This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 4~~~~~~~~~~ h

Orinoco Essequio

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Figure 1. The Main River Systems of "the Amazon"

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions TOWARDS AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON: FromPrehistory to the NineteenthCentury*

David Cleary TheNature Conservancy

Abstract:This article reviews the environmental history ofthe Amazon basin from earlyprehistory tothe 1850s, concluding atthe start of the rubber boom. It argues thatthe Amazon's past can be understood interms of a transitionfrom wilderness tolandscape, ina broadlysimilar way to the environmental history ofEurope and NorthAmerica. A detailedoverview of the archaeological record suggests that bothfloodplain and upland environments were heavily influenced byhuman in- terventionduring prehistory. The colonial and early republican periods also saw dramaticenvironmental changes. Interpretations ofthe Amazon that stress environmentalconstraints onhuman agency or portray itas largelyvirginal or un- settledprior to the modern period are at bestan oversimplification.

On bothsides of this river we passedthe most beautifull countrie thatever mine eies beheld; and whereasall thatwe had seenbefore was nothingbut woods, prickles, bushesand thornes,heere we beheld plainesof twenty miles in length, thegrass short and greene, and in diversparts groves of trees bythemselves, as ifthey had been byall theart and labour in theworld so madeof purpose; and stilas we rowedthe Deere camedowne feeding by the waters side, as ifthey had beenused to a keeperscall

SirWalter Raleigh, 1596 TheDiscoverie of the Large, Rich andBewtiful Empyre of Guiana

*The author would like to thankBill Woods forthe map and help with the archaeology, threeanonymous LARR reviewersfor their help in refiningthe text,and JohnWomack and the Departmentof Historyat Harvard forproviding the new institutionalcontext that gave birthto it. Views expressed are personal and unrelatedto The Nature Conservancy.

LatinAmerican Research Review volume 36 number2 ? 2001 65

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To begin at thebeginning: where is theAmazon, and what is meant by it? This is not as strangea question as it mightseem. The riverthe En- glishlanguage calls theAmazon has threenames in Portugueseand Span- ish. The Amazonas applies only fromthe estuaryto the junctionwith the Rio Negro. Thereafterthe riverbecomes the Solim6es untilit entersPeru, whereit is called theMarafo6n. Scholars typically take refuge in theillusory certaintiesof physicalgeography and use the termAmazon as a synonym forthe Amazon basin,the area drainedby themain channelof the Amazon and its tributaries.But thisapproach is also problematic,since in thispart ofthe world theboundary between land and waterfluctuates. The seasonal rhythmsof climateand rainfallflood large plains on the edges of theAma- zon basin: the grasslands and forestislands of Llanos de Mojos in north- easternBolivia, the Rupununi savanna in the Guyanese interior,and the Pantanalmarshlands in Mato Grosso.These annual floodsextend the capil- larynetwork of Amazonian riversto communicatewith adjoining river sys- temsthat are not partof the Amazon basin: theRupununi to theEssequibo and theMojos to theGuapore and thencevia thePantanal to theheadwaters of the Paraguai. In addition,a permanentwaterway, the Casiquiare Canal, linksthe southern headwaters of the Orinoco with the northern headwaters of the Rio Negro. In theory,with good timingand patience,a small canoe could travelfrom the Orinoco estuaryto the mouthof the Rio de la Plata, one ofthe few journeys apparently never made by some crazed adventurer. These connectionsare not mere geographicalcuriosities. They formedthe basis of an extensivesystem of trade routesprior to the sixteenthcentury thatlinked the Amazon to the Orinoco,the Caribbean,and theAndes.' As ifthese fuzzy boundaries were not enough, definitions of the Ama- zon based on physicalgeography are vulnerableto reductioad absurdum. A numberof river systems in theGuiana Shield,most notably the Essequibo but also includingthe Corantijn,the Maroni,and the Oiapoque, drain into theAtlantic rather than into the Amazon. The mostextreme example is the Brazilianstate of Amapa', on thenorthern shore of the Amazon estuary,riddled by riversystems draining into eitherthe Amazon or theAtlantic and thereforesimultaneously part and not part of theAmazon basin. It would be a brave academic or politicianwho argued thatGuyana, Surinam,and FrenchGuiana are notAmazonian countries,even thoughregional hydrog- raphyclearly shows thatamong themthey cannot muster a singleriver that drainsinto the Amazon.2 Anthropological convention likewise dictates that

1. The most detailed work on ancienttrade networks concerns links among theCaribbean, the Andes, the Orinoco, and northernAmazonia. See A. Boomert,"Gifts of the Amazons: GreenstonePendants and Beads as Items of Ceremonial Exchange,"Antropologica 67 (1987): 33-54; and Neil Whitehead,"The Mazaruni Pectoral:A Golden ArtefactDiscovered in Guyana and the Historical Sources ConcerningNative Metallurgyin the Caribbean, Orinoco, and NorthernAmazonia," Archaeologyand Anthropology7 (1990):19-36. 2. One could quibble thatFrench Guiana is not a countrybut an overseas departmentof

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON themany indigenous peoples of the Guianas are unambiguouslyAmazon- ian, while maps ofthe distribution of "Amazonian language families"take in the southernCaribbean and much of the Orinoco.3Virtually no one ac- tuallymeans the Amazon when saying it,and this articleis no exception. The area is vaguelydefined, taking in mostof the northern and centraltropi- cal lowlands of South America,and is not restrictedto theAmazon basin. Sometimesit stretches as faras thesouthern Caribbean coast or theOrinoco or Paraguay,sometimes it does not. But howeverscholars choose not to defineit, the Amazon is, trueto stereotype,the mostbiodiverse place in the world. The listsof numbersof species become steadilymore meaningless with repetition-how can scien- tistsknow how manyspecies are unknown?What is clear is thatno taxon- omy,indigenous or scientific,adequately captures the full variety of habitats and ecosystemsthat the region contains. Beyond thegeneral distinction between varzeafloodplain and upland terrafirme, no standardtaxonomy ex- istsof regional environments, although several attemptshave been made.4 Classificationbecomes an exercisein fractalgeometry: the closer one comes, themore underlying patterns of complexity reveal themselves. It is an enormous ironythat this complexity, taken for granted and enthusiasticallycat- alogued forover three centuries in specialistcircles, coexists with a tradition oferudite and popular representationof tropical nature in theAmazon that stressesits uniformityand monotony.Not the least of the complicationsof writingabout theAmazon is the persistenceof these stubbornrepresenta- tionalconventions, which have conditionedperceptions of the region from thecolonial period to thepresent. Forests, however classified, are portrayed as virginaland primeval.The regionitself is seen as impenetrable,when a simple glance at a map shows thatno place on earthoffers more avenues of penetration.The mere notion of an environmentalhistory of the Amazon thereforeimmediately leads to a paradox: eitherit will be the historyof a naturaldomain thatcan have no historyexcept for the tale ofits destruction,

France,but the inclusionof Surinam and Guyana in theAmazon Pact clearlyshows thatthe Guianas are regardedinternationally as Amazonian. One ofthe many interesting things about themis theinterstice they occupy between theAmazon and theCaribbean. For example,they were regarded as part of the Caribbean world by theircolonial masters,and cricketis the national sport of Guyana. They exemplifythe fuzziness of regional boundaries discussed here. 3. See, forexample, Peter Riviere's setting of Guiana Amerindiansin a broaderAmazonian contextin Individualand Societyin Guiana:A ComparativeStudy of Amerindian Social Organiza- tion(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984); and the foundationalmap ofAmazon- ian language distributionby CurtNimuendajiu, Mapa etno-hist6ricodo Brasile regidesadjacentes (Rio de Janeiro:Instituto Brasileiro de Geografiae Estatistica,1980, firstpublished in 1944). "The Guianas" are here understoodto compriseGuyana, Surinam,and FrenchGuiana. 4. For a valiantrecent attempt, see Emilio Moran, ThroughAmazonian Eyes (Iowa City:Uni- versityof Iowa Press, 1993).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review or itwill be thehistory of a naturaldomain fartoo complexfor a chronolog- ical accountof its developmentto be imagined. This articlewill summarizethe environmental history of the Amazon fromprehistory to thestart of the rubber boom. The modernperiod requires a separateessay, given the speed and scale ofenvironmental transformation. The argumentrejects the idea thatanything like a comprehensiveenviron- mentalhistory of the Amazon is impossible,given the biological complexity ofthe region. In some respects,one could argue thatthe Amazon is actually an easier subjectfor environmental historians than some otherparts of the world. The size of the regionis not an insurmountableproblem. Environ- mentalhistorians have tended to take largegeographical areas as theirunit of analysis:the Mediterranean, the Caribbean and Mexico,North America, theBrazilian Atlantic forest, even Europe and theAmericas combined.5 No individual could hope to masterall the sources bearingon environmental change in such well-studiedregions, as is reflectedin the canonical texts. FernandBraudel, Carl Sauer, and AlfredCrosby wrote synthesizing over- views based on radicallyselective reading and archivework, but theyare no less valuable forthat. The factthat the Amazon has inspireda less volu- minous literaturethan Mexico or theCaribbean, for example, is in some re- spectsunfortunate but at least allows researchersto mastera largerpropor- tionof the sources. Far frombeing impossible to write,the broad outline of environmentalchange in theAmazon is actuallyfairly straightforward. It has five phases: earlyhuman occupationbased on a combinationof fishing and for- aging;a subsequentintensification of land managementover at least 10,000 years;depopulation precipitated by the arrivalof Europeans and therecol- onizationof much of the basin by forestand secondarygrowth; an expansion of extractivismin the late nineteenthcentury and the reoccupationof riverineecosystems, during which the Amazon's population returnedto pre-Columbianlevels; and a phase of unprecedentedlyrapid environmental change in the postwar period, most of it unnecessarilydestructive and concentratedmore in upland ecosystemsthan the floodplain.The devil is in thedetail, and therest of this article will be devoted to exorcisingit to the

5. FernandBraudel, The Mediterranean and theMediterranean World in theAge of Philip II (New York:Harper and Row, 1973); AlfredCrosby, The ColumbianExchange: Biological and Cultural Consequencesof 1492 (Westport,Conn.: Greenwood, 1972); Elinor Melville,A Plague ofSheep: EnvironmentalConsequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Carl Sauer, TheEarly Spanish Main (Berkeleyand Los Angeles: Universityof California Press,1992; first published in 1966); and David Watts,The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture,and EnvironmentalChange since 1492 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987). For Brazilianenvironmental history, scholars owe an enormousdebt to the pioneeringwork of WarrenDean, tragicallyabbreviated by his prematuredeath. See especially Braziland the StruggleforRubber: A Studyin EnvironmentalHistory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and WithBroadax and Firebrand:The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof CaliforniaPress, 1995).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON extentpossible in a singleessay. This is a largelyempirical exercise, but it is importantto bear in mindthe theoretical issues thatthe endeavor addresses. In recentyears, the centralquestion in debates about theAmazon in a numberof disciplineshas been the natureof environmentalconstraints on economyand culture.Ironically, part of thisargument is grounded in a much moredetailed awareness ofbiological complexityand regionalvari- ation withinthe Amazon. This body of knowledge emerged in turnfrom researchdriven by concernfor what was routinelyconstructed by policy makers,scientists, and othersas pristinewilderness. In thisbarrage of new data and novel interpretations,one factstands out: the scale of human in- terventionin Amazonian ecosystemsover time. Researchers now know that the South Americanlowlands were occupied by humans formany thousands of years longerthan was previouslythought.6 Intensive agriculture was practicedby indigenous Amazonians in both floodplainand upland environmentsfor millennia before the arrival of Europeans. Significant landscape transformationoccurred, in several locationson a scale thatcan only be appreciatedfrom the air.Historians can suspect thatthe population de- clinesubsequent to the arrivalof Europeans in theAmazon was even more precipitousthan has been supposed, althoughit operated over a longertime- scale thanpreviously thought. It is known thatthe consequent reversion of muchof the basin, especially the floodplain, to uncultivated secondary growth by thenineteenth century meant that much ofthe supposedly primevalfor- est was actuallybetween one and two centuriesold, at least along themain channelof theAmazon and its tributaries,by the timea seriesof greatnat- ural scientistsintroduced the regionto the internationalreading public in quintessentiallyVictorian books saturatedwith liberal Romanticism and an omnivorous,interdisciplinary scientific zeal.7 In thedebates over environmentalconstraints, a definingfeature has

6. The dates are highlycontroversial. One site at Pedra Furada in northeasternBrazil has been convincinglydated at circa 50,000 B.P. See Paul Bahn, "50,000-Year-OldAmericans of Pedra Furada," Nature362 (11 Mar. 1993):114-15.Although this point is controversialin North Americanarchaeology, it is less so in Europe,where it is widely acceptedin Franceand Britain. Anothersite, Monte Verde in Chile, excavated by Thomas Dillehay,has been securelydated at around 12,500B.P. Bothfindings imply initial human occupationof theAmazon manymil- lennia priorto the earliestcarbon dates recordedup to the present(circa 11,000B.P.), but this is conceivable.The spottynature of the archaeological record in thelowlands at presenttogether with the collapse of the Clovis paradigm suggest thatas furtherresearch is done in the lowlands, the date forinitial human occupation of the Amazon will move back in time.The lat- est evidence to emerge,skeletal remains from southern Brazil dated tentativelyat 11,500B.P., reinforcesthis supposition. See "An AncientSkull Challenges Long-Held Theories,"New York Times,26 Oct. 1999,p. Dl. 7. Theirclassic textsare a basic sourcefor the environmental or any otherhistory of the lowlands. See HenryBates, The Naturalist on theRiver Amazons (London: JohnMurray, 1863); Alex- ander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland, PersonalNarrative of Travels to theEquinoctial Re- gionsof the New Continent (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown,1821-1825); Johann Spix and Carl von Martius,Viagem pelo Brasil, 1817-1820 (Sao Paulo: Itatiaia,1981; first published

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review been an unproblematizeddistinction between the naturaland the cultural, and argumentsover the extentto which, crudely speaking, nature con- strainsculture.8 To outsiders,these argumentsmust oftenappear provin- cial. Some anthropologistsand archaeologistsadopted a position of hard environmentaldeterminism, arguing that the natureof Nature in theAma- zon precluded formsof social organizationmore complex than the small village and shiftingcultivation, unless theAmazonians happened to be in- trudersfrom more socially advanced partsof the continent (like theAndes) in the process of decline.9Others rejected the termsof the debate and criti- cized thedistinction between the natural and thecultural on bothphilosoph- ical and ethnographicgrounds. The most extended critiquewas provided by Philippe Descola, who has argued thatthe multiplicityand synergistic natureof relationshipsbetween an Amazonian societyand its environment in practicemakes determiningcausation dangerously speculative.10 A neat example of thisabstract point is Laura Rival's analysis of the relationship between the Huaorani and peach palms. Peach palm groves grow in the forestbut are managed by theHuaorani in complexways. Like manyforms of indigenousland managementin Amazonia, Huaorani peach palms fall intoa grayarea betweengathering and farmingthat makes a distinctionbe- tweenthe wild and thedomesticated impossible to maintain:forests can be tame and gardens wild.11The constructionof the nature-culturedualism is our problem,not theirs.12

in 1831); Richard Spruce, Notesof a Botaniston theAmazon and Andes (London: Macmillan, 1908); and AlfredWallace, A Narrativeof Travels on theAmazon and Rio Negro(London: Reeve, 1863). 8. The numberof potentialcitations here is enormous.A representativesample of the an- thropologicalschool of environmentaldeterminism is AdaptiveResponses of Native Amazo- nians,edited by RobertHames and WilliamVickers (New York:Academic Press, 1983). This work is a productof a predominantlyNorth American approach oftencalled human ecology, whose best-knownexponent is perhapsNapoleon Chagnon.A fundamentalcritique is Philippe Descola, In theSociety of Nature: A NativeEcology in Amazonia(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sityPress, 1994). A similaropposition exists in archaeologybetween the work of Betty Meggers and Anna Roosevelt,cited in subsequent notes. 9. The best-knownexpression of thisview is BettyMeggers, Amazonia: Man and Culturein a CounterfeitParadise (Washington, D.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1996; firstpublished in 1971). 10. Descola, In theSociety of Nature, 5-6. He is talkingof theAchuar, but the point holds for indigenous societiesin theAmazon in general. 11.Laura Rival,"Domestication as a Historicaland SymbolicProcess: Wild Gardensand Cul- tivatedForest in theEcuadorian Amazon," in Advancesin HistoricalEcology, edited by William Balee (New York:Columbia UniversityPress, 1998), 232-50. 12. Ethnoecologistshave made thisargument for a long time.See ResourceManagement in Amazonia:Indigenous and Folk Strategies, edited by DarrellPosey and WilliamBalee (New York: New YorkBotanical Garden, 1989), vol. 7 of Advancesin EconomicBotany. See especially the contributionsby Balee, "The Culture of Amazonian Forests,"1-21, and Dominique Irvine, "Succession Management and Resource Distributionin an Amazonian Rainforest,"223-37.

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It followsthat a trulyhistoricized account of theAmazon's past, an indispensablepreliminary to policy makingin the present,should regard thenature-culture divide thathas underlainso muchresearch on Amazonia with deep suspicion.I suggestthat the notionof landscape and landscape history,derived fromenvironmental history, is one way out of the various intellectualand representationalproblems that have bedeviled writingon the Amazon. "Landscape" is not the most precise of concepts,but it does conveythe transition from wilderness to artificiallymodified and manipu- lated environment,in whichnature coexists with culture and imbuesit with a sense of scale thattranscends the purely local. It is now clearthat since the late Pleistocene (before 12,000 B.P.), indigenous Amazonians have been manipulatingecosystems, dealing or failingto deal with ecosystemre- sponses to human intervention,and unleashinga chainof intended and un- intendedenvironmental consequences. In Europe and NorthAmerica, the studyof the transition from wilderness to landscape has been a centralcon- cernof environmentalhistorians and historicalgeographers for decades.13 It may seem somethingof a leap fromthe manicured landscapes ofTuscany and the Cotswolds to the Napo or the Solimoes,but understandingof the Amazon would be helped by thinkingof it as landscape and understanding itspast in termsof landscape formation,as in dealing withEurope or North America:something produced by complexinteractions between humans and ecosystemsfrom the Pleistoceneto the present. There are many importantdifferences among landscape formation in Europe,North America, and the Amazon: huge variationsin densityof settlement,agricultural intensity, and continuityof occupation. From the seventeenthcentury to the present,the historyof theAmazon is about dis- placement,depopulation, and recolonization,not the intensive, continuous, and wholesale transformationsthat have markedlandscape historyin Eu- rope and NorthAmerica. But I would suggest thatthe evidence as to the antiquityand scale ofthe human presence in Amazonia makes comparisons withEurope and NorthAmerica far from fanciful. For example,the mound complexesof Marajo and Llanos de Mojos immediatelymake one thinkof theparallels that might exist with the mound complexesof Cahokia and the MississippiValley, another American varzea supportinga complexciviliza- tion thatcollapsed centuriesbefore the arrivalof Europeans. The number and size of anthropogenicsoil deposits in the Amazon remindone of the mulchingand compostingpractices of intensiveEuropean farming,or the centralvalley of Mexico priorto conquest.The differenceis thatindigenous Amazonians,through the deploymentof a specificallyAmerican crop arse-

13. See, forexample, William Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder and Stoughton,1955); Elias Sereni,History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape (Princeton, N.J.: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1997); and JohnStilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to1845 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 1982).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review nal of manioc and maize, appear to have been more successfulthan their Europeanpeasant counterpartsin generatingagricultural surpluses on supposedly marginallands, at least untilthe IndustrialRevolution. Domesticatedforests, wild gardens . .. In short,if we thinkof the Amazon as landscape,an arena ofagency rather than a constrainingwilder- ness,we mightget somewhere.

PREHISTORY One instinctivelydislikes the term.If the archaeologyof the Ama- zon teaches anything,it is the historicalnature of its prehistory,the half- understooddynamics of its progressions from initial occupation to agriculturalintensification and therise and fallof complex societies. But there seems to be no more convenientone-word shorthand for the immensestretch of timebetween initial indigenous colonization and the firstEuropean incur- sions in thesixteenth century. Precontact is equally unsatisfactory,given the frequencyof contactamong its peoples, the extentof settlementand trade, and the largelyunreconstructable complexity of prehistoricexchange. It seems misleading but unavoidable to use a single termfor such a long period of time,agglomerating the minimalenvironmental impacts of the firstsettlers with the intensive exploitationof floodplain and upland ecosystemsin the late prehistoricperiod. That said, what is known about the prehistoryof theAmazon?14 More than is oftenthought. Archaeological writing on the Amazon oftenbegins witha litanyof the gaps in knowledge:the peculiar problems posed by tropicalenvironments for preserving organic material and artifacts, thehigh costs and discomfortinvolved in fieldresearch, and thepaucity of properlydocumented and excavated sites,no more than the odd colored pin on a verylarge map.15Without minimizing the importanceof gaps in the researchliterature, I findthis conventional pessimism to be misplaced. Archaeologistsworking in theAmazon have been able to interrogatea varietyof historical sources: colonial and national-perioddocuments, mission records,accounts by scientistsand travelers,and amateurand semiprofes- sional excavationsin thenineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. From all these sources,scholars have been able to extractuseful information,even

14. Recent reviews with detailed bibliographies include Neil Whitehead, "Amazonian Archaeology:Searching for Paradise? A Review of RecentLiterature and Fieldwork,"Journal ofArchaeological Research 4, no. 3 (1996):241-64;Claudio Barreto,"Brazilian Archaeology from a BrazilianPerspective," Antiquity 72, no. 277 (Sept.1998):573-80; and Eduardo Neves, "Twenty Years of Amazonian Archaeologyin Brazil (1977-1997)," in the same issue, 625-32. The last two are rare and fascinatingreviews in Englishby Latin Americanarchaeologists. 15. A good example of the genreis one of the standardtextbooks, S. Fiedel, Prehistoryof the Americas(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1987), 192-93.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON identifypromising field sites.16 When themodern archaeological literature ofthe lowlands is viewed as a whole, mostprimary research from the 1960s on actuallytells a ratherconsistent story, with differencesamong individual researchersturning more around points of detail than the broad chronologiesand lifewaysof prehistoric Amazonians, which command widespread consensus.17It is now increasinglyclear that the Amazonian data fit into a wider continentalpicture, supporting the findingsof otherresearch in Mexico,Chile, and non-AmazonianBrazil that push thedates forthe peopling of South Americaback to the late Pleistocene(before 12,000 B.P.), at least. The factthat this record of consistentarchaeological findings stretch- ing back over thirtyyears has not been more widely recognized until re- centlyhas nothingto do withthe qualityof the research per se but withthe factthat the Latin Americandates and interpretivehypotheses did not ac- cordwith the Clovis model forthe peopling of the Americas, to whichmany U.S. archaeologistswere committed.18Findings fromLatin America (in- cluding the Amazon) thatundermined the Clovis model were ignored or subjectedto unreasonableattack.19 Thus a mistakenview was perpetuated thatthe Amazon was marginalto Americanprehistory, a region where cul-

16. A discussion of the varietyof sources available and an illustrationof theirpotential can be found in Anna Roosevelt,Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on Maraj6 Island,Brazil (San Diego, Calif.:Academic Press,1991), chap. 2, "Method and Theoryfor Ama- zonian Archaeology."A specificexample is the way HerbertSmith's account of the middle Amazon in the 1870s has guided modern researchersto terrapreta sites; see note 32. 17. This assertionrequires some justification.The overview offeredhere would be con- testedin most of its details by BettyMeggers, who has excavated widely in Brazil,Ecuador, and the formerBritish Guiana since the 1940s and stillparticipates actively in debates in lowland archaeology.Her last systematicfield research in the Amazon, however,was in the late 1950s.A subsequentgeneration of archaeologists went to thefield in the 1960s,notably Donald Lathrap,whose work heavilyinfluenced historical geographers such as WilliamDenevan. It is theirwork, together with that of Anna Roosevelt and otherssubsequently, on which I base thisgeneralization. 18. The Clovis model argues thatthe Americaswere settledvia land bridges in the Bering Straitand that early Americans arrived on the NorthAmerican plains between 11,000and 12,000years ago. For an exasperatedEuropean and LatinAmerican perspective on the Clovis debates, see Niede Guidon and B. Arnaud, "The Chronologyof the New World: Two Faces of One Reality,"World Archaeology 23, no. 2 (1991):167-78.It is worthnoting that even within U.S. archaeology,some researchersdissented fromthe Clovis timescales. The best-known textbookfor North and South American archaeologysuggested thathuman colonizationof SouthAmerica began as long ago as 17,000B.P. See GordonWilley, An Introductionto American Archaeology(Englewood Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971), 2:29. 19. An interestingexample was a letterfrom Vance Haynes, a prominentU.S. defenderof the Clovis model, which suggested thatseeds discovered in a cave site in the BrazilianAma- zon thatyielded inconvenientradiocarbon dates mighthave been deposited by naturalpro- cesses. See Science275 (28 Mar. 1997):1948. Given that Haynes has spent his professional careerin theU.S. Southwestaffiliated with the University of Arizona and his mostsignificant fieldworkoverseas was in the Sahara Desert,his grasp of tropicallowland ecology revealed an unexpectedbreadth of knowledge.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review turaldevelopment was heavily constrainedby the difficultiesposed by a hostilenatural environment. The picturethat emerges from the archaeological record gives thelie to thisstereotype. The earliestundisputed radiocarbondates froma site in the lowlands are froma cave, Pedra Pintada,near the town of Monte Ale- grein themiddle Amazon. They suggestinitial occupation by nomadic for- agers subsistingon a combinationof fishingand fruit-gatheringaround 11,000B.P.20 Futureresearch is likelyto push the date of initialhuman occupation of theAmazon much furtherbackward. The specificfruits found at Pedra Pintada suggestthat the modernpresence of treespecies adapted to disturbancein the area can be traced back to Pleistoceneoccupations. The oldest ceramicsfound in theAmazon are decoratedfragments from a midden in thesame generalarea and date fromaround 7,500B.p.21 This find predates the earliestAndean and Mesoamerican potteryby some 3,000 years,probably confirms northern South America as the earliestceramic- producingregion in theAmericas, and provideshard evidence that the Ama- zon was occupied beforethe Andes.22 Given thatthe ceramics found were decorated,earlier plain ceramics must remainto be discovered.Their presence would stronglysuggest that at least on thefloodplain, a transitionto permanentsettlements and a mixed economy,agriculture in combinationwith fishingand fruit-gatheringand probablywith manioc as the chiefcrop, had already taken place in some locationsin theearly Holocene (circa10,000 B.P.). The earliestclear evidence of maize cultivationcomes fromthe Ecuadorian Amazon and dates from around6,000 B.P., suggestingthat maize cultivationspread fairly rapidly into theAmazon fromits origins in CentralAmerica.23 Pollen evidencefrom the same sitesuggests a patternof shifting cultivation over three millennia, with agricultureintensifying significantly around 2,500 B.P., togetherwith con- siderableforest disturbance. This findingsuggests that one of thecauses of Amazonian biodiversityin upland ecosystemswas adaptation to human disturbanceover thousands of years.The level of disturbancewas intense at some locations.Continuous occupation has been confirmedat one sitein the westernBrazilian Amazon fromaround 8,000 B.P. to the seventeenth century.24More recentresearch has shown thatagricultural intensification,

20. Anna Roosevelt et al., "Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in theAmazon: The Peopling of the Americas," Science272 (19 Apr. 1996):373-84. See also the subsequent exchanges between Roosevelt and her critics:"Paleoindians in the BrazilianAmazon," Science274 (13 Dec. 1996): 1823-26;and "Dating a Paleoindian Site in theAmazon in Comparison withClovis Culture," Science275 (28 Mar. 1997):1948-52. 21. Anna Roosevelt et al., "EighthMillennium Pottery from a PrehistoricShell Midden in the BrazilianAmazon," Science254 (13 Dec. 1991):1621-24. 22. Meggers has argued the opposite. 23. See M. Bush, D. Piperno,and P. Colinvaux, "A 6,000Year Historyof Amazonian Maize Cultivation,"Nature 340 (27 July1989):303-5. 24. Neves, "TwentyYears ofAmazonian Archaeologyin Brazil," 628.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON once thoughtto be confinedto the floodplain,also occurredin terrafirme uplands: late prehistoricdeforestation, illustrated by aerial photography, has been dated to betweenA.D. 900 and 1400 in the Upper Xingu'in central Brazil. There indigenous peoples lived in village sites much larger than postcontactvillages, combining manioc farmingon a substantialscale with fishing.25 The mostdramatic evidence oflarge-scale landscape creationcomes fromtwo othersources, both long knownto specialistsbut whose truesignif- icanceis onlybecoming apparent in conjunctionwith more recent discover- ies.These sources are the existence of complex ridged field sites, spectacularly evidentin aerialphotographs, and theemerging scale ofanthropogenic black- earthdeposits, terra preta do indio, throughout the Amazon but documented best in Brazil,Venezuela, and Colombia.26The ridgedfields typically occur on thefringes of the Amazon basin proper,in savanna zones liable to flood- ing and dottedwith forest islands. One implicationis thatseveral savanna areas in theAmazon mightbe anthropogenicin origin.27In at least one area, theisland of Marajo, prehistoric Amazonians possibly modified existing ridge topographyto irrigateon a largescale, rather than constructing ridged fields fromscratch.28 The ridgedfield sites operated on an impressivescale, around 50,000acres in Llanos de Mojos and 15.5 square kilometersin CanioVentosi- dad in Venezuela. They would theoreticallyhave been capable of supporting hundredsof thousands of inhabitants.Whether they actually did so is open to question,since an unknowablebut considerableproportion of pro-

25. Michael Heckenberger,"Manioc Agricultureand Sedentismin Amazonia: The Upper XinguiExample," Antiquity72, no. 277 (Sept. 1998):633-47.He notes,"Xinguano communities exist in intricateanthropogenic landscapes formedin the natural environmentby the long- termoccupation of specificecological settings,"p. 642. 26. For ridged fieldsites, see WilliamDenevan, "The AboriginalCultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia," Ibero-Americana,no. 48 (1966); JamesParsons, "Ridged Field Sites in theRio Guayas Valley,Ecuador," AmericanAntiquity 34, no. 1 (1969):76-80;and C. Spencer, E. Redmond,and M. Rinaldi,"Drained Fields at La Tigra,Venezuelan Llanos: A RegionalPer- spective,"Latin American Antiquity 5, no. 2 (1994):119-43.An earlydiscussion of theirsignifi- cance can be found in Donald Lathrap,The UpperAmazon (New York:Praeger, 1970),160-63. A veryuseful overview of the currentstate of knowledge is Clark Erickson,"Archaeological Methods forthe Study ofAncient Landscapes of Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon," in Archaeologyin theLowland American Tropics: Current Analytical Methods and RecentApplica- tions,edited by PeterStahl (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1995). For black-earth sites,see Nigel Smith,"Anthrosols and Human CarryingCapacity in Amazonia," Annalsof theAssociation of American Geographers 70, no. 4 (Dec. 1980):553-66;M. Eden, W. Bray,L. Her- rera,and C. McEwan, "Terrapreta Soils and Their Archaeological Context in the Caqueta Basin of Southeast Colombia," AmericanAntiquity 49, no. 1 (1984):125-40; and William Woods, "Commentson the Black Earthsof Amazonia," Papersand Proceedingsof Applied Geo- graphyConferences 18 (1995):159-65. 27. The termanthropogenic means caused by humans,wholly or in part. 28. T. Myers,"Agricultural Limitations of the Amazon in Theoryand Practice,"World Ar- chaeology24, no. 1 (1992):82-97,esp. 91-92.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review ductionmust have been funneledinto regional trade.29 The ridgedfield sites may be evidence of increasingdemographic pressure on resourcesor an increasinglysophisticated pre-Columbian economy geared towardproduc- ing agriculturalsurpluses for trade and exchange,a probabilitylargely un- exploredby archaeologists. The main crop grown on these fields was manioc, possibly inter- cropped with maize and squashes.30Save forthe factthat manioc was the main cultigenrather than maize, the fieldsbear a marked resemblanceto otherridged fieldsystems in Mesoamerica and NorthAmerica in the late prehistoricperiod. They also suggestthat some Amazonianpopulations may have achieved comparablelevels ofdemographic density. For example,the populationdensities calculated for La Tigrain Venezuela matchthose of cer- tain settlementtypes found in theValley of Mexico.31 Given the collapse of Marajoara culturearound the fourteenthcentury A.D. and the description of palisades and large defensiveworks in the firstEuropean accounts of Amazon towns and villages in the sixteenthcentury, an intriguingpossi- bilityis thatsome Amazonian societiesmay have enteredthe same cycleof agriculturalintensification and eventualoverexploitation of the environment thatprobably lay behind the decline of the Maya and the abandonmentof the mound complexesof the MississippiValley Terrapreta deposits echo ridged fieldsystems in theirimplications. While theirexistence has been noted by travelersand scientistssince the nineteenthcentury,32 their significance was not widely realized until the 1980s. Even now the most basic factsabout the natureand distributionof thedeposits are stillbeing debated: there is consensuson theiranthropogenic originbut on littleelse. Whiletheir systematic mapping is stillin itsinfancy, itis clearthat the number of deposits in theAmazon totalsmany thousands. The most detailed mapping of terrapreta deposits in a single area, along the Arapiuns Riverin the middle Amazon, revealed "many hundreds" of

29. For example, Denevan calculates the ridged fieldsof the Mojos could have supported a population of 500,000,larger than the currentpopulation of the region. 30. Pollen analysis,the standardtechnique for reconstructing ancient cropping patterns, is impossiblewith manioc because it is propagated by cuttingsand releases almost no pollen. Processing manioc requires complicated technology,however, and its presence can be in- ferredfrom these materialremains. 31. Spencer,Redmond, and Rinaldi, "Drained Fields at La Tigra,"126. But see the caveats by Bill Woods on calculatingpopulation densitieson terrapreta sites. 32. A detailed descriptionof deposits around Santaremand the way theywere known and exploitedby local farmerscan be found in HerbertSmith, Brazil: The Amazons and theCoast (London: Sampson Low, Marston,Searle, and Rivington,1879), chap. 4. One ofthe firstmodern archaeologiststo work in the Amazon, Peter Hilbert,immediately noted theirimpor- tance,but because he published in Portugueseand German,it took decades forhis pioneer- ing workto percolateinto the English- language literature.See Hilbert,A ceramicaarqueoldgica da regidode Oriximind(Belem: Institutode Antropologiae Etnologia do Para, 1955).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON separate sites.33Like ridged field sites,they date fromthe late prehistoric period and are oftenassociated with ceramics and othertraces of habitation. They can also be verylarge. Manacapuru', on the middle Amazon near the town ofAlenquer, was measured at over 2 kilometerslong and 400 meters wide.34Terra preta deposits were once thoughtto be limitedto thefloodplain buthave now been reportedin upland sitesand interfluvesas well,although upland deposits tend to be smaller.35 Intriguingly,although they have been routinelydescribed as "mid- dens," the majorityof deposits appear not to have been village or house- hold sitesbut theproducts of long-termmulching and compostingof agri- culturalfields, even in locationsof sandy soils and blackwaterrivers long consideredproblematic for agriculture. Along theArapiuns, one such agri- culturallymarginal ecosystem, hundreds of prehistoricterra preta deposits are stillrecognized and exploitedby modernfarmers. Furthermore, it appears thateven afterabandonment, soil dynamicsresult in terrapreta deposits expandingover time.One researcherhas suggestedthat they should be regardedas approximating"more closely a livingorganism than an inert fossil."36At least one well-documentedexample of soil-enrichmenttech- niques practicedby a modernAmazonian people, the Kayapo of southern Para, fitswith the observed pattern of terra preta deposits and is connected withthe improvement of cleared fields rather than midden formation around villages.37Similarly, the sixteenth-centurydescriptions of the fields and settlementsof the Tapajo people, lining the bluffsand shorelinearound what is now the cityof Santarem,are consistentwith the ubiquityof terra pretadeposits in theregion. Again, one is confrontedwith the inadequacies of the nature-culturedualism in the field.Anthropogenic in originbut not in theirgrowth, terra preta deposits, like the Huaorani peach palm, embody both the practicaland the epistemologicalcomplexity of Amazonian landscape history. The implicationsare important.Terra preta sites may be a dangerous basis on whichto projectprehistoric population estimates, but theyare consistentwith a generalpicture of agriculturalintensification in the late prehistoricperiod, in upland ecosystemsas well as on thefloodplain.38 In com-

33. J.McCann and William Woods, "The AnthropogenicOrigin and Persistenceof Ama- zonian Dark Earths,"in ConferenceofLatin Americanist Geographers Yearbook 25, edited by Cesar Caviedes (Austin: Universityof Texas Press, in press). Terrapreta deposits in the Arapiuns riverbasin is the subjectof McCann's doctoralthesis in progress. 34. Gordon Willey,An Introductionto American Archaeology 2:412. 35. Interfluvesrefer to upland areas between rivers.As a map of the Amazon basin makes clear,the interfluveis a veryconvenient unit of descriptionof subregionsof Amazonia. 36. Woods, "Commentson the Black Earthsof Amazonia," 162. 37. Susanna Hecht and Darrell Posey, "PreliminaryResults on Soil Management Tech- niques ofthe Kayap6 Indians," in Posey and Balee, ResourceManagement in Amazonia,174-88. 38. McCann and Woods, "The AnthropogenicOrigin and Persistenceof Amazonian Dark Earths,"in press.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review binationwith what is known of the antiquityof human settlementin the Amazon, thenumber and wide distributionof terra preta deposits strongly suggestthat few if any parts of the Amazon were unoccupied duringpre- history.The bulk ofthe archaeological record comes fromriverine sites, and the literaturecontains a strongassumption that the intensiveexploitation of the floodplainrecorded in the firstEuropean accounts in the sixteenth centuryreflects the greater desirability and ecologicalpotential of the floodplain,as comparedwith the uplands and interfluves.This inference is clearly trueup to a point,but theemerging, albeit more fragmentary, archaeological evidencefrom the uplands suggeststhat the opposition between terra firme and floodplainhas been overemphasized.Far frombeing marginal,the uplands werealso colonized and underwentthe same processesof agricultural intensificationand demographicconcentration that can be documentedmore extensivelyin thefloodplain. Upland population densitiesmust have been lower,but thismay have been a reflectionof the exceptionalenvironmental potentialof the floodplain rather than an indicationof environmental poverty in theuplands. To take one geographicalexample, consider the large interfluvein thesouthern Amazon basin bounded by theheadwaters of the Xingu' to the east and theTapajos to thewest. Although some archaeologicalstudies have been done in this area, not a greatdeal is known about regionalarchaeol- ogy.Most of the published researchon the regionis in Portuguese,little- known outside Brazil.Another important category of relevantinformation existsin the formof unpublished reportsand documents,which are diffi- culteven forspecialists to findand evaluate. In boththe Upper Tapajos and theUpper Xingu',modern archaeological research began in the1950s. Other documentarysources provide a basic outlineof the region back to theseven- teenthcentury.39 In thisrespect, it is a typicalexample of how a large area of theAmazon (in thiscase, about the size of Colorado) appears, or not,in the literature.Nevertheless, once again the broad outlineof eventsis clear. Althoughthe earliestradiocarbon dates fromsites on the Upper Xingu'go back to around A.D. 900, thissituation reflects the lack of detailed research

39. The mission systemdid not penetrateas faras the Upper Xingu and Tapaj6s untilthe late nineteenthcentury, thus deprivingresearchers of one ofthe most useful sources untilrel- ativelylate. But slave raidersarrived, as did traders,forming a new mosaic ofpolitical alliances and conflictsbetween neo-Europeansand indigenous peoples in the region.This occurrence allows ethnohistoriansto reconstructthe region'shistory from the seventeenthcentury on in some detail.See the contributionsin the section"Amaz6nia Meridional" in Historia dosIndios do Brasil,edited by Manuela Carneira da Cunha (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1992), 281-380.Additional accounts were writtenby nineteenth-centuryscientists (Henri Coudreau forthe Upper Tapaj6s and Carl von den Steinenfor the Upper Xingu),and the firstmodern anthropologicalaccounts of both the Upper Xingu and the Tapaj6s date fromthe 1920s,by Curt Nimuendaju. Specialists will note that this sequence of sources is typical of upland Amazonia.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON ratherthan particularly late occupation.The southernAmazonian plateau was colonized at least 10,000years ago and probablyearlier.40 Much older dates thanthose from the Xingu have been obtainedfrom the Upper Tapajos, althoughthey have not yetbeen published. Wooden artifactsfrom a large terrapreta deposit on theRato Creek,a tributaryof the Tapajos, were dated to around 3,000B.p.41 The significanceof thisdate is thatthe site is located about 30 kilometersup a small creek,suggesting widespread occupationof the area, includingterra firme uplands, even at such an earlyperiod. Since the 1960s,the Upper Tapajos has become thelargest informal- sector goldfieldin the Amazon, and miners regularlyreport finding ceramics,wooden artifacts,and skeletalremains in thecourse ofexcavations, which generallyresult in the destructionof the site.42Although no systematic mapping of archaeologicalor terrapreta sites in theUpper Tapajos has yetbeen made, the regionis riddled withboth. There is no reason to think thathad gold minerscombed theUpper Xingu'with the same thoroughness, a similarnumber of siteswould not have been foundthere. Even given the unsystematicnature of archaeologyin the region,it is evidentthat reasonably complex settlementexisted by the end of the prehistoricperiod. The most recentsignificant piece of researchfrom the Upper Xingu'describes verylarge village sites(between 30 and 50 hectares)dated around A.D. 1500. These siteswere heavilyfortified through large-scale earthworks and palisades and linkedto each otherby a complexroad system,an interestingexample of nonriverinetransport networks in the prehistoricAmazon.43 It seems reasonableto suppose thatthe defensive earthworks are evidence of large-scaleconflict with geographically distant adversaries and thereforealso of at least occasional tradelinkages with distant peoples.44 It also seems reasonable to suppose thatthere is a stronganthropo- genic elementin the regional landscape. Prehistoricagricultural fields in

40. Michael Heckenburger,"War and Peace in theShadow of Empire:Sociopolitical Change in the Upper Xinguiof SoutheasternAmazonia, A.D. 1400-2000," Ph.D. diss., Universityof Pittsburgh,1996. 41. Anna Roosevelt,letter dated 23 Sept. 1993.The collectionswere made by Dr. Alicia Duran Coirollo,of the Museu Paraense EmflioGoeldi in Belem,with the assistanceof the European Commission and ImperialCollege Consultants. 42. My fieldworkwith miners in the Tapaj6s began in 1989 and included fouryears of con- tinuousresidence in theregion between 1994 and 1998.1 saw thishappen manytimes. Together withDr. Coirollo,I witnessedthe destructionof a prehistoriccemetery near the centerof the town of Itaitubain 1994 by a municipal constructioncrew. Many mine owners keep a collec- tion of ceramics,wooden artifacts,and bones thattheir miners have come across. 43. Heckenberger,"War and Peace in theShadow ofEmpire." For prehistoricroad networks in the Amazon, see W. Denevan, "PrehistoricRoads and Causeways of Lowland Tropical America," in AncientRoad Networksand SettlementHierarchies in theNew World,edited by C. Trombold(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991),230-42. 44. The Kayap6, one people of theUpper Xingu,engaged in raidingexpeditions exceeding 400 kilometersuntil fairly recently. See G. Verswijver,Club-Fighters ofthe Amazon: Warfare among theKaiapo Indians of Central Brazil (Ghent, Belgium: Rijksuniversitiet, 1992).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review theUpper XingI were largeenough to be identifiedthrough aerial photography and dwarfmodern fields.One of the contemporarypeoples of the Upper Xingu,the Kayapo, are renownedfor the sophistication of their land- managementtechniques.45 The well-documentedKayapo practiceof intensive managementof forestislands in savanna raises a series of interesting questionsabout thecultural origins of central Brazilian savanna landscapes. Althoughprojecting contemporary land-management practices into the past is an elementarymistake, it is inconceivablethat cultures capable of land managementon thescale revealedby Michael Heckenberger'ssatellite images were not at least as sophisticatedin theirenvironmental manipula- tionsas thecontemporary Kayapo. Modern practicescan thereforebe used as a baseline forevaluating the past. These supposedly marginalupland environments,then, were unquestionablysettled for millennia before the arrivalof Europeans and supporteda much largerpopulation than has tra- ditionallybeen assumed forthe region.46Their ecosystems, far from being "natural,"formed in adaptationto human interventionsin the landscape. Scholarsalready know thatthis was thecase in thefloodplain, thanks to theearly European accountsof Amazonian peoples and environmentsin the sixteenthcentury. The European presencein the sixteenthcentury was sporadicrather than permanent but was well documented.Two Spanish ex- peditionstraveled down theAmazon, FranciscoOrellana in 1542 and then Pedro de Ursu'aand Lope de Aguirrein 1561.Their accounts are available, togetherwith the surviving accounts of the ultimately unsuccessful attempts of northernEuropeans (English,Dutch, and Irish) to establishsettlements in thelower Amazon fromthe 1550s on.47 For a longtime, the Spanish sources especiallywere regardedas unreliable,full of the exaggerationstypical of early conquistador accounts. They certainlycannot be read as straight-

45. Heckenbergerreproduces two extraordinarysatellite images of large-scaleprehistoric deforestationnear village sitesin "War and Peace in theShadow of Empire,"100-101. On the Kayap6, see Hecht and Posey, "PreliminaryResults on Soil ManagementTechniques." 46. William Denevan, in the most widely quoted estimateof prehistoricpopulation in the Amazon, calculates 0.2 inhabitantsper square kilometerof "interiorlowland forest"and 0.5 for"Brazilian central savannas," the two most importantenvironments in the Upper Xingu- Tapaj6s interfluve.See Denevan, "The Aboriginal Population of Amazonia," in The Native Populationof theAmericas in 1492, edited by Denevan (Madison: Universityof Wisconsin Press,1992), 205-34, 230. Heckenberger'swork suggeststhis figure must be a serious under- estimatein thatit compares with an estimatefor the floodplainof 14.6. 47. The chronicleof the Orellana expedition,written in 1542 by Gaspar Carvajal, was the firstEuropean account of the Amazon. A criticaledition with notes and supportingdocu- mentsis TheDiscovery of the Amazon, edited by J.Medina (New York:Dover, 1988). A chronicle of the Ursua expeditionwas writtena year afterthe eventby a participant.See F Vazquez, El Dorado:Cronica de la expedicionde Pedrode Ursuay Lopede Aguirre(Madrid: Alianza, 1992). See also thecollection of accounts by otherparticipants in T. Ortiguera,"Jornada del Marani6n," Bibliotecade AutoresEspafioles 206 (1968):217-358.For English and Irishsixteenth-century accounts,see Englishand IrishSettlement on theRiver Amazon, 1550-1646, edited by J.Lorimer (London: HakluytSociety, 1989).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON forwardethnographic description. Yet in manyrespects, they do chimewith theemerging archaeological record of the floodplain. On pointssuch as size and appearance ofsettlements, trade products, food stocks,agriculture, and naturalresource management, there is a highdegree of internal consistency betweenthe two Spanish accountsand otherEuropean sources. Theydescribe a floodplainenvironment under intensive exploitation: large stocksof manioc storedin towns and broad roads leading to planted fields,settlements lining bluffs continuously for several miles,large-scale farmingof turtles in pens,fisheries, swarms of canoes, and some settlements defendedby palisades and earthworks-forall the world like the Upper Xingu',against whose inhabitantsthe defenses could conceivablyhave been constructed.Perhaps themost suggestive fact is thatthe Ursuta-Aguirre expeditionwas some nine hundredstrong yet traveled with few supplies and foundlittle difficulty in replenishingits stocks,by trade or force,from the peoples encounteredalong the way. It seems likelythat the floodplaindid not supportsimilar numbers again untilthe rubberboom of the late nineteenthcentury. To thisday, in many areas of thevarzea, themodern inhab- itantsfarm terra preta patches and build theirhouses around ancientmid- dens. But they are fewerin numberthan the population seen by Gaspar Carvajal in 1542, part of a landscape as thoroughlyformed as that of Castile,and probablymore denselypopulated.

COLONIALISM AND AFTER Contraryto commonassumption, a hostilenatural environment had littleto do withthe late arrivalof European settlersin theAmazon and the patchyEuropean colonization of the region during the colonial period. Spain and Portugalto an even greaterextent had limitedresources with which to runtheir imperial enterprises. They concentrated their efforts on theregions thatoffered the most immediateeconomic returns,as close as possible to theiroriginal landfalls and penetrationroutes: the Caribbean islands, the centralvalley of Mexico, the Andean mines,and theplantations of northeastern Brazil. The Amazon thus became a peripheryby accidentrather than predestination. Thingscould have turnedout verydifferently. By the timethe Por- tuguese turnedtheir attention north in the earlyseventeenth century and finallymoved decisivelyagainst the English and the Dutch, sugar plantations had already been established in northeasternBrazil. The districtof Alcantaraon thecoast ofMaranhao, on thefringes of the Amazon basin and muchmore a partof the Amazon thanthe northeast in environmentalterms, became fora shorttime an importantpart of the northeasternplantation complex-yet anotherdemonstration of fuzzy regional boundaries. Pre- vailingwinds and currentsmade communicationsbetween Belem and Lis- bon easier and quickerthan between Belem and the restof Brazil,reflected

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review in thefact that northern Brazil was ruled formost of thecolonial period di- rectlyfrom Portugal ratherthan as part of the viceroyaltyof Brazil.48In othercircumstances, one can imaginethe rich alluvial soils ofMarajo Island or the Igarape-Mirimregion near Belem or the estuariesof the Guianas as importantplantation zones withinthe Atlantic system. All have produced highyields of sugarcanefor over threecenturies, serving regional markets intothe twentieth century. And all are closerto Europe,North America, and theAtlantic trade routes than northeastern Brazil. They were moremalarial and more subjectto floodingthan the Northeast, but theirmarginalization withinthe Atlantic plantation complex resulted more from the factthat the colonial metropolihad limitedresources and otherpriorities than from any environmentalbarrier to colonization.When internaland externalprerequi- sitesmeshed, as theydid in Maranhao in thelate eighteenthand earlynine- teenthcenturies, Amazonian estuariesand varzeas were rapidlyconverted to plantationagriculture with littleproblem. The factthat the cottonand sugar theyproduced were subsequentlydriven out of world marketswas again due to externalfactors, such as competitionfrom North America and preferentialEuropean tariffs for Caribbean colonies, rather than environmental constraints.49 But marginalizationhas its advantages. In the Amazon, it certainly improvedthe quality of colonial documentation. In broad terms,in boththe Portugueseand theSpanish Amazon, theCrown constructedan alliance of conveniencewith the missionary orders, particularly the Jesuits, Franciscans, Carmelites,and Mercedarians.These groupsbecame one ofthe two princi- pal agents of European expansion into the lowlands over the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies and lefta richliterature behind them.50The other agents were the small numbers of European settlersand entrepreneurs attractedor deportedto thelowlands, who competedwith the missions for access to indigenous labor in an extractiveeconomy based on Indian slav- ery.5lTheir efforts,in both the long and the shortterm, transformed the regionallandscape. Changes had already taken place even beforethe establishmentof permanentEuropean settlementin theearly seventeenth century. Although

48. Fora discussionof communications between Brazil and Portugal,see A. J.R. Russell-Wood, "Portsof Colonial Brazil," in AtlanticPort Cities: Economy, Culture, and Societyin theAtlantic World,1690-1850, edited by F. Knightand P. Liss (Knoxville:University of Tennessee Press, 1991), 196-239. 49. For an analysis of the late-colonialboom in Maranhao and its aftermath,see A. de Almeida, A ideologiada decadencia (Sao Luis de Maranhao: Institutode Pesquisas Sociais, 1983). 50. A comprehensivelisting of the mission sources forthe Portuguese and Spanish Ama- zon can be found in the annotated bibliographyof D. Sweet, "A Rich Realm of Nature De- stroyed:The Middle Amazon Valley,1640-1750," Ph.D. diss., Universityof Wisconsin,1974. 51. Sweet provides the most comprehensiveaccount of the mission systemand the Ama-

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON only a small minorityof indigenousAmazonians could actuallyhave laid eyes on a European by the timethe cityof Belem was foundedin 1616,the economyand societyof the Amerindian Amazon was alreadybeing transformed.While the Spanish expeditions made onlyfleeting visits, by 1616the Englishand Dutch had already establisheda numberof tradingposts and "factories"-grandnames forcrude stockades and hutsunder constant dan- gerof attack from European rivals or indigenous enemies-in theestuary and middle reachesof theAmazon. The Spanish had occupied the Orinoco es- tuarysince the earlysixteenth century, and the Dutch made a vigorous at- temptto dominatethe interiortrade of northernAmazonia fromSurinam afterbeing pushed out of the Amazon estuaryin the seventeenthcentury. Fromthese initial centers of dispersal, metal axes, knives, guns, and fishhooks began to circulatealong long-establishedtrade routes and new networksof ethnicalliance and antagonismcrystallized by theslave tradeand theavail- abilityof a new orderof trade goods. These new indigenousnetworks were soon overlaid by the developing networksof the mission systemover the next 150 years.52Metal goods were acquired in exchange forfoodstuffs, slaves, and the drogasdo sertao.This extraordinarilylong list of products (usually mistranslatedas coming fromthe forest)testifies to the compre- hensivenessof indigenous resourcemanagement and the avidityof Euro- pean markets:sasparilla, sassafras, vanilla (which the Europeans encoun- teredin theAmazon forthe firsttime), wild cinnamon,cacau, nutmegand cloves,manatee meat and oil,turtle shells, meat, eggs and oil, feathersof all kinds,annato, tonka beans, fava beans, timber species by thescore, chinchona bark,tobacco, isinglass, rubber, waxes, cotton,twines, vines, hides, skins, cashew and Brazilnuts, gums, resins, caulks; and themyriad regional prod-

zonian economy duringthe colonial period. For the mission systemin the Spanish Amazon, see A. Golob, "The Upper Amazon in Historical Perspective(Peru, Ecuador)," Ph.D. diss., City Universityof New York,1982. For Bolivia and the Llanos de Mojos, see David Block, Mission Cultureon the UpperAmazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and SecularPolicy in Moxos,1660-1880 (Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1994). Scholars writingin English have concentratedon the Jesuits.The lack of studies of othermissionary orders is a significant gap in the literature.For a less Jesuiticalaccount, unfortunatelyrestricted to the Por- tugueseAmazon, see A historiada Igrejana Amazonia,edited by E. Hoornaert(Petr6polis: Vozes, 1992). 52. Thereare many ethnohistoricalstudies tracingthese processes over the colonial period in differentparts of the Amazon. A concise summaryof the practicaland theoreticalissues involved is Neil Whitehead,"Ethnic Transformation and HistoricalDiscontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500-1900,"L'Homme 126-28, nos. 13-14 (1993):285-305.A landmark studyin the ethnohistoryof the lowlands is Whitehead's Lordsof the Tiger Spirit: A Historyof theCaribs in ColonialVenezuela and Guayana,1498-1820 (Providence,R.I.: Foris,1988). Two in- triguingdetailed reconstructionsof the materialtransformation of indigenoussocieties, even withminimal physical contact with Europeans, are N. Farage,As muralhasdos sertoes: Os povos indfgenasno Rio Brancoe a colonizacao(Rio de Janeiro:Paz e Terra,1991); and B. Ferguson, YanomamiWarfare: A PoliticalHistory (Santa Fe, N.M.: School ofAmerican Research, 1995).

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review ucts withno translationto thisday, such as guarana',urucum, andiroba oil, massaranduba,jutaicica, copaiba oil,ucuuiba oil, piassava, breu,estopa, tapi- oca, puxuri,bombonassa, tucum fibers, carnauiba wax, ipecac,jatoba, jarina, and curare.53This firstcolonial extractivistboom has long been overshad- owed by themore famous boom of thenineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries,but its environmentalconsequences were just as dramatic. Firstcame a leap in theproductivity of indigenous agriculture caused by the influxof metal tools,although it is uncertainwhether this develop- mentgreatly increased the actual amountof forestclearance. Extra produc- tionwas certainlyneeded to meetthe European demand forfoodstuffs, but the Europeans were not presentin large numbers and rapidly adopted manioc as the staple of theirdiet. Evidence abounds of large-scaleprecolo- nial productionof manioc,as noted. Given thatthe indigenouspopulation was decreasingfrom the sixteenth century onward and thatthe acquisition ofmetal goods was a powerfulmotive for the diversion of indigenous labor out of agricultureinto extractivism,it is even possible thatthe transition fromstone to metalinvolved no increasein forestclearance. New European crops,livestock, and domesticatedanimals were introduced. Chickens, pigs, cattle,and guinea fowl became a part of everyAmazonian village scene withina couple of centuries.Most importantwas a revolutionin the orien- tationof trade and transportnetworks in thelowlands. Previously,the laby- rinthineriver system had operated to connectthe floodplains with the uplands, and it was upon thatinternal relationship that the whole structureof prehistoricsociety and economydepended. Withthe arrivalof Europeans and theimplantation of an extractivisteconomy, the regional economy was turnedinside out and reorientedtoward the coast. The tradelinks that had integratedthe lowlands with the Andean highlands for millennia were ruptured,and the Amazon became more isolated within the continent while a new networkof externalrelationships-administrative, economic, and religious-tenuously began to bind it to Europe. The firstindigenous cultures pulverized by slavers,disease, and the missionsystem were thereforethe peoples of the vatrzea,whose success in colonizingthe rich floodplain environment of the main channelof the river systemput themsquarely on the main exitroute for the slaves and drogas do sertaoheading forthe coast. Withina couple of centuries,the stretches ofthe Solimoes and Amazonas floodplainthat had boasted thehighest populationdensities in theAmazon basin in thesixteenth century were reduced

53. This listwas compiled fromexport items appearing in colonial documentsreproduced in the followingsources: A. Carreira,A CompanhiaGeral do Grao-Parde Maranhao(Sao Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1988); and A Amazoniana era pombalina,edited by M. de Mendonca (Sao Paulo: GraficaCarioca, 1963); Dicciondriohist6rico, geographico e ethnographico do Brasil(Rio de Janeiro:Imprensa Nacional, 1922).Also consultedwere mid-nineteenth-century export records in the president'sreports to the legislaturesof Para and Amazonas; see note 56.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON to a largelyempty landscape, enormous distances separating isolated villages and occasional homesteads.54 Butit was notonly the floodplain that was transformedby thecolonial economy.Drogas do sertao came fromupland as well as floodplainenvi- ronments,and in therush to findmarketable quantities, sustainability was rarelya consideration.As timewent on, slavers,extractivists, and missionaries were all forcedto range furtherand furtherafield to locate theirre- spectiveproducts, as moreconvenient sites were rapidlyexhausted through overexploitation.In the modernperiod, the extractionof drogas do sertao (tropicalforest products or TFPs in the unlovely specialistjargon) has become synonymouswith sustainable resource management. But formost of theAmazon's history,extractivism has resemblednothing so much as strip- mining.Many ofthe details of this extractivist assault are lacking,but clearly some itemswere already seriouslydepleted by the nineteenthcentury.55 Reasonablysystematic export records exist for the Brazilian Amazon forthe 1840s on because the provincialadministration depended on taxes on the movementof goods ratherthan on incomes.56According to these records,exports of turtleand manatee productswere minimalby the mid- nineteenthcentury; when theyoccurred at all, theamounts were verysmall. Yetone findsfrequent descriptions during the colonial period oflarge-scale exploitationof turtles and manateesfor both domestic and exportmarkets. These animalswere notablefor the range of products they provided. Turtles yieldedfresh and salted meat,shells for jewelry and combs,eggs, and turtle oil. The oil representeda major industryof the floodplainduring the colonial period,when entirevillages would decamp to sandbars forweeks at a timeto collecteggs and produce oil at certaintimes of year.Manatees also produced meat and oil. Mexira,manatee meat cooked and preservedin its own fat,was also an importantexport. It took around two centuriesof intensiveexploitation to decimateturtle and manateestocks. Probably only the diversionof all available labor intorubber extraction after 1850 saved them fromextinction along the main channel of the Amazon.57Other resources survivedthe colonial assault with little apparent problem. The sourcesnever

54. See, forexample, the descriptionsof the Solimoes in the 1820s in Spix and Martius, Viagempelo Brasil, vol. 3; and H. Maw, Journalof a Passagefrom the Pacific to theAtlantic (Lon- don: JohnMurray, 1829), chaps. 9-11. 55. The most usefuloverview of colonial extractivism,based on a painstakingcompilation of primarysources, is R. Anderson, "Following Curupira: Colonization and Migration in Para, 1758 to 1930,as a Study in Settlementof the Human Tropics,"Ph.D diss., Universityof California,Davis, 1976,esp. chap. 1. See also Sweet, "A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed." 56. For the BrazilianAmazon, these exportstatistics are found in annexes and fiscaldata set out in the reportsof the provincialgovernors from Para (series beginningin 1833) and Amazonas (1852on). Theywill be citedhereafter as Relat6rios,followed by provinceand date. 57. See Nigel Smith,"Destructive Exploitation of the South AmericanRiver Turtle,"Year- bookof the Pacific Coast Geographers 36 (1974):85-102.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review mentionshortages of fish.Dried and salted pirarucufwas an Amazonian codfishsubstitute that served both the regionand exportmarkets. Yet the nineteenth-centurysources, despite constantcomplaints about food shortages and highprices in urbanareas, always mentionthe availability of dried fish.The issue appears to have been a culturalpreference for meat on the partof the upper classes. Problemswith the overexploitationof fishstocks apparentlydid not occur untilthe twentiethcentury. If the colonial economygreatly influenced change in the landscape, the othermajor influencewas colonial demography.The topic is contro- versial.Once again theAmazon has sufferedfrom stereotyping, in thiscase an assumptionthat the Amazonian experiencebroadly reflectsthat of indigenous populationselsewhere in theAmericas: in otherwords, they were devastatedby epidemicsin shortorder. As a numberof scholars have pointed out,overenthusiastic microbe-centered readings of LatinAmerican history oversimplifywhat actuallyhappened in the lowlands.58In contrastto the dense and clusteredindigenous populations in theAndean highlandsand Mesoamerica,who were throwninto earlyand intensivecontact with rela- tivelylarge numbers of Europeans in circumstancesthat guaranteed frequent and deadly epidemics,Amazonians were fewerin number,more dispersed, and lived in a largergeographical area. Because of the sporadic natureof earlyEuropean penetrationof theAmazon, Amazonians came intocontact withEuropean diseases laterthan other native Americans. It is theonly part ofthe hemisphere where this process continues to thepresent day, through cyclesof infection traveling along traderoutes, with or withoutdirect physical contactbetween Indian and non-Indian. Smallpox exemplifiesthe specificitiesof Amazonian history.The sixteenth-centuryNorthern European sources make no mentionof smallpox in theAmazon. Nor do thesixteenth-century sources from the Orinoco, althoughthe Spanish had lived theresince the earlypart of the century.Yet it was preciselyduring this period thatsmallpox was decimatingthe Incas, Aztecs, and natives of the Caribbean islands. The apparent delay in the arrival of smallpox in the lowlands may be artificial.It could have been simplythat the relatively few Europeans present happened not to come across any cases. But the balance of probabilityis that smallpox took a century longerto arrivein theAmazon. A numberof factorsexplain the difference: thesmallpox virus's intolerance of heat or brightsunlight, the reorientation ofAmazonian tradeand communicationsaway fromthe Andes towardthe coast, and the irregularityof directcontact with Europe during the sixteenthcentury. The firstrecorded cases of smallpox in the Amazon date from1621, a directconsequence ofthe Portuguese decision to move against otherEuropeans in the Amazon estuary.The disease was importedby a

58. A concise summaryof the issues here is provided by Whitehead in "EthnicTransfor- mationand HistoricalDiscontinuity," 288-91.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON ship arrivingfrom northeastern Brazil, where smallpox had been established since the mid-sixteenthcentury.59 From then on, smallpox was part of the social fabricof the Amazon into the twentiethcentury. Popular resistance to variolationand vaccinationcontributed to itslongevity and mortality,de- spitethe factthat the firstrecorded vaccination attempts against smallpox in Latin America were made in the Amazon in 1729 by a Carmelitemis- sionary.60But its spread, although rapid, was uneven.By the end ofthe seventeenthcentury, smallpox had moved along themain channelof the Amazon to reachthe Jesuitprovince of Maynas in the extremewest of theAmazon basin.It had also reachedthe mission villages of Llanos de Mojos in presentday Bolivia, althoughit is sometimesdifficult to distinguishbetween An- dean and lowland originsof smallpox epidemics in the westernAmazon. Its lethalityduring this period is undoubtable.Mission sourcesand admin- istrativecorrespondence routinely provided harrowing descriptions of suf- fering.But after about a century,mortality rates declined sharply as survivors developed resistanceand epidemics became less frequent.All the docu- mentationrefers to the floodplain,but one can inferthat it took longer to arrivein the uplands, and longestof all in the southernbasin, where trade routesand missionaryefforts were less concentratedthan in the west and the north. The generalpoint here is thatgreat variation occurred in the cycles ofdisease outbreak,mortality, and resistanceover time and space, withsome groups climbingback up the population curve at the same time as others endured the high mortalityof firstcontact with Old World diseases. The exact sequence of eventswas determinedby several factors,not just physical contactwith Europeans: local ecology,participation in trade networks and the colonial economy,relationship to the mission system,and so on. Amidstthis complexity, a fewgeneral points stand out. First,the floodplain rapidlybecame theunhealthiest place to be foran indigenousAmazonian, and not just forthe access it offeredto slavers and missionaries.It was a perfectsetting for the spread of malaria and otherdiseases withinsect vec- tors.61Although indigenous American strainsof malaria may have pre- dated thearrival of Europeans, the floodplain environment ensured that new European and Africanstrains rapidly became endemic.Second, disease was closely linked to the geographyof the mission system,which was highly riverine.The missionswere onlydubiously effective at producingconverts but were veryefficient machines for propagating disease. Theyconcentrated

59. Sweet, "A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed,"79. 60. Ibid., 88. 61. Leishmaniasis,endemic in theAmazon to thisday, is anotherexample. An Africandis- ease withan insectvector, it was firstrecorded in theAmazon in theearly nineteenth century. It cannot be a coincidence that a reasonably large-scaleAfrican slave trade to the Amazon began in the late eighteenthcentury.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review peoples of differentethnic and geographicorigin in a single floodplainlo- cation,ensured regular physical contact with Europeans, and disruptedin- digenousfarming and resourcemanagement with ill-considered, often com- icallydisastrous attempts to produce a pseudo-European monocultivating peasantry.62 Finally,the salient fact of the impact of disease on indigenous Amazonians is thatit helped to produce a dramaticpopulation decrease throughoutthe Amazon by the nineteenthcentury. Disease had help, of course: a brutalslave economy,made morebrutal still by the violence and dislocationit broughtto indigenoussocieties throughout the interior,even those never withinthe ambit of missionaryorders or colonial states.Nor did the declining populations of mission villages necessarilyreflect the death of all the absentees:the missionswere also factoriesfor detribaliza- tion and assimilation.By the timethe mission systemcollapsed when the Jesuitswere expelled by jealous secular authoritiesin the 1750s and 1760s, detribalizedIndians had become the largestelement in the region'spopu- lation.They formedthe basis forthe modernriverine mixed-race peasants called caboclosin thePortuguese-speaking Amazon and riberefiosin the Span- ish areas. Gentiobecame gente,but therewere markedlyfewer of them. Com- paring sixteenth-centuryaccounts of the same stretchesof the Amazon withnineteenth-century sources shows thatwell enough. Numbers games are divertingbut embodytoo many dubious assumptionsto be sound. Let me merelysay thatwhen thearchaeological record and the earlyEuropean accounts are run past the firstsemireliable estimates of the nonindigenous population of the BrazilianAmazon in the mid-nineteenthcentury, a conclusion of literaldecimation seems defensible. The impacton thelandscape was paradoxical.While theextractivist explosionwas causing serious damage to ecosystemsin thefloodplain and uplands, depopulationwas allowingforest to recolonizeareas whereit had been cutback in thelate prehistoricperiod, especially the upland savannas and thefloodplain. These were preciselythe areas thatwould be visitedand used as collectionsites by nineteenth-centurynatural scientists and miscon- struedas virginand primeval.Meanwhile, Europeans were introducingnew formsof land use withincreasing impacts: new formsof plantationagriculture,notably cacau, sugar,and coffee,as well as cattleranching. The loca- tion of these new land uses was determinedby a combinationof environ-

62. For an overview ofthe implications of missionization for the missionized, see D. Sweet, "The Ibero-AmericanFrontier Mission in Native AmericanHistory," in TheNew LatinAmeri- can MissionHistory, edited by ErickLanger and R. Jackson(Lincoln: Universityof Nebraska Press, 1995), 1-48. For a perspectivefrom the horse's mouth,see J.Daniel, TesouroDescoberto noRio Amazonas: Anais da BibliotecaNacional vol. 95 (Rio de Janeiro:Biblioteca Nacional, 1975). See especiallyBook 5 on agriculture.Daniel, a Jesuitpriest, spent decades in theAmazon try- ing unsuccessfullyto get mission Indians to adopt Portuguesefarming methods and crops.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON mental factorsand economic geography.Europeans realized at an early stage thatmany partsof the lowlands containedgrasslands and savannas well-suitedto cattleand horses.By themid-eighteenth century, most of the large-scaleenterprises in the regionwere cattleranches: the Mercedarian and Carmeliteranches on Marajo island in theAmazon estuary,the Jesuit herdsof Llanos de Mojos, thesettler and missionestancias of the Venezuelan llanos, and the royalfazendas of the Rio Branco in the savannas that ran fromRoraima in the PortugueseAmazon to the Guianese interior. Plantationagriculture during the colonial period, with the impor- tantexception of cacau, tendedto be on or near thecoast and was restricted to thealluvial soils ofthe floodplain or low-lyingterra firme. Sugar and cotton in westernMaranhao and the coast of the Guianas were exportcrops, but in othercases agriculturewas an adjunctto thedomestic economy, used to produce not so much sugar as rum.This tradeitem and culturalweapon was so importantthat the Crown neverdared or cared to tax it,and its sig- nificanceis matchedonly by its invisibilityin the historicalrecord.63 Until the arrivalof permanentsteam navigationin theAmazon in the 1850s,the only industrialmachines in the regionwere occasional steam-powereden- genhosin sugar plantations. The one exceptionto the crablikeclustering of plantationsaround the coast was the Amazon's most importantexport crop prior to rubber, cacau.64Cacau plantationswere establishedon the coast around Cayenne and theestuaries of Surinam during the eighteenth century, using wild cacau plants broughtback by extractivistexpeditions. Sugar proved more prof- itable. By the mid-eighteenthcentury, the main focus of cacau production had shiftedto thePortuguese Amazon, whereincreasing shortages of wild cacau as extractivism-depletedstocks encouraged settlers to experimentwith cultivation,after some diligentprodding by theCrown. The need to turnto plantationswas yetanother indication of the impact of colonial extractivism in that"wild cacau"-probably thedescendants of cacau plantedand managed by indigenousAmazonians a few centuriesago-was verycommon

63. No overview ofAmazonian-Guianan plantationsystems has been writtenfor the colonial period. Much useful materialcan be gleaned fromR. Price's trilogyon the Saramaka maroons of Surinam:First Time (Baltimore, Md.: JohnsHopkins UniversityPress, 1983); To Slay theHydra (Ann Arbor,Mich.: Karoma, 1983); and Alabi's World(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1990). A useful comparisonof the plantationsystems of Para and FrenchGuiana can be foundin C. de Cardoso, Economiae sociedadeem dreas coloniais perife'ricas: GuianaFrancesa e Pard,1750-1817 (Rio de Janeiro:Graal, 1984). On the rum industryand the interiortrade, see S. Anderson,"Engenhos na varzea: Uma analise do declinio de um sistema de producao tradicionalna Amazonia," in A fronteiraagrfcola vinte anos depois,edited by P. Lena and A. de Oliveira (Bel6m: CEJUP,1990). 64. Dauril Alden, "The Significanceof Cacau Productionin theAmazon Region in theLate- Colonial Period: An Essay in Comparative Economic History,"Proceedings of theAmerican PhilosophicalSociety 120, no. 2 (Apr. 1976):103-35.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions LatinAmerican Research Review in the lower reaches of the Amazon River and its main tributariesin the earlycolonial period.65 By thelate eighteenthcentury, the only significant interior plantation complexanywhere in theAmazon untilthe modern period had takenshape in thefloodplain and terrafirme between the towns of Santarem and Obidos, on the middle Amazon. Cacau continuesto be grown in the middle and lower Amazon to the presentday, although its primacyin the exportmar- ketwas ended by the growthof cacau productionin southernBahia in the late 1800s.The nineteenth-centuryscientific accounts of the middle Amazon revealthat cacau estateswere the only reasonably large-scale economic enterprises on the floodplainprior to the rubberboom. The ranchingindustry, largelyunvisited by foreignersbecause it tended to be concentratedin the moreremote llanos and savannas offthe main channelof the Amazon, was at least as importantan industryin termsof value ofoutput and numberof people involved-and certainlymore important in termsof environmental impact.Ranching first stopped and thenreversed the encroachment of forest on savannas in many partsof the Amazon by the mid-nineteenthcentury, as theherds grew and urbanization,with its carnivorous bourgeoisie, began to affectthe region. The growthof the cacau plantationcomplex through the eighteenth centurywas significantnot just in its own terms.It proved to be a vital de- velopmentfor the extractivistsector as well. Priorto the growthof cacau exports,the international linkages of the Amazonian economyhad been ten- uous at best. The difficultiesof communicationwith the Andes afterthe disruptionof indigenous trade routes in the early colonial period meant thatthe westernAmazon could send only low-bulkand high-valueprod- ucts to Quito and Lima. Spanish rivalrieswith the Portugueselimited the extentto whichthe main channelof the Amazon could be used as an export corridor.This situationpresented almost insuperable problems for the non- subsistencecolonial economy,in strikingcontrast to the scale of agricul- turalproduction in theprehistoric economy. Even thelargest economic en- terprisesin thewestern Amazon, such as theranches and plantationsof the Jesuitmissions in Llanos de Mojos, were not profitableand depended on externalsubsidies.66 In the easternAmazon, althoughextractive products abounded, theyoften rotted on the quayside due to the lack of ships link- ing Belem to exportmarkets. In 1748not one ship bound fora non-Brazilian portcalled at the city,and just one in 1754 and in 1758.67Ships did not call predictablyuntil cacau productionbecame regularand large-scalewith the growthof plantations.And because it was a relativelylow-bulk commod- ity,cargo space remainedto be filledby otherproducts, notably the drogas

65. Ibid., 116. 66. Block,Mission Culture on theUpper Amazon, 72-77. 67. Alden, "Significanceof Cacao Production,"133.

This content downloaded from 128.227.207.181 on Sat, 11 Jul 2015 18:27:36 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE AMAZON do sertdo.68Without cacau plantations,the impact of extractivismprior to the rubberboom would have been considerablyattenuated. A good illustrationof the transformationsinvolved in the regional landscape is thehistory of Amazonian boatbuilding.From Gaspar Carvajal to NationalGeographic, observers have noted how thepeculiarly Amazonian combinationof riverswith innumerablespecies of timberhas made boat- buildinga central(albeit largely unstudied) featureof regionalculture and economy.Colonial illustrationsshow thatthe meetingof European and indigenous traditionsof marinedesign had led to the growthof a shipbuild- ing industryof remarkablesophistication before the end of the eighteenth century.The thousandsof river craft, large and small,upon whichthe economy and regionaltransport depended were all locally made.69The Portu- guese Crown,attracted by the abundance of ship timber,located one of its threeBrazilian naval shipyardsin Belem,which rapidly became thelargest- scale industrialenterprise in theAmazon, with a workforceof 370 as early as 1771.This yardwas one of themost important centers of naval construc- tionin the PortugueseEmpire, building twelve oceangoing ships between 1801 and 1822, includingthe forty-gunfrigate Imperatriz.70 This ship, re- centlycompleted, happened to be in the shipyardwhen it was capturedby Britishmercenary Admiral Thomas Cochranein the fightingthat attended theindependence of Brazil in 1822.His expertassessment of its quality and theexcellent local materialsthe shipwrights had to workwith made itsway intohis memoirsmany years later.Cochrane had reason to know the ship well because he sailed it as a prize back to England.71This and the other ships were all made fromlocal timber,but as the nineteenthcentury pro- gressed,shortages of timber restricted the shipyard to producingbarges and lightersfor river traffic. From the 1850s on, reportsof the provincialpresi- dentsof Para'and theimperial ministry of the navy noted the need to send woodcuttingteams as farafield as the headwatersof theCapim and Acara' Rivers,over 100 kilometersfrom Belem, to findparticular timber species.72 The nextmajor ship to be builtat theshipyard, the gunboat Manaos in 1881, had a deck and masts made of importedNorth American pine, a striking demonstrationof the denuding of the Amazon estuaryof the hardwoods thatindigenous and European boatbuildershad countedon forcenturies.73

68. Ibid., 132. 69. Forreproductions of colonial illustrations of river boats and theirmanufacture, see Alexan- dre RodriguesFerreira: A Amaz6nia redescobertano s&ulo XVIII (Rio de Janeiro:Biblioteca Nacional, 1992), plate 21; and Historiados Indiosno Brasil,edited by M. Carneiro da Cunha (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras,1992), 110-11. 70. Summaryof the shipyard'shistory and figuresare based on the Relatoriodo Ministroda Marinha,1873 (Rio de Janeiro:Typographia Americana, 1873), 27. 71. Thomas, Earl ofDundonald, Narrativeof Services in theLiberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil fromSpanish and PortugueseDomination (London: JamesRidgeway, 1859), 2:64-65. 72. See, forexample, Relat6rio, Para, 1855 (n.d.),p. 21; and Relat6rio,Para, 1 Oct. 1859,p. 55. 73. Relat6rio,Para, 15 Feb. 1881,p. 36.

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CONCLUSION Whendoes modemhistory begin? At different times in differentplaces, butfor the Amazon thedecade ofthe 1850s seems thelogical choice, ushered in by CharlesGoodyear's accidentaldiscovery of vulcanization and theini- tiationof regularsteamboat services on theAmazon in 1853. This reduced journeytimes fromweeks to days and more than any othersingle factor made the Amazon into an integrated,relatively efficient export economy, completewith banks, telegraphs,and opera houses. Withthe opening of themain channelof the Amazon to ships of all nationalitiesby theBrazilian governmentin 1866,all the majorpreconditions for the rubberboom were in place, althoughit would not peak foranother thirty years. Once it did, the boom set offa process of landscape transformationthat accelerated, stopped,reversed, and thenaccelerated again, repeatingin the course of a single centurythe nonlinearsequence of theAmazon's environmentalhis- toryover the previous fifteen or twentythousand years. This is anotherstory, to be writtenseparately. But it allows me to hope thatthe century ending as I writeturns out to be a palimpsest,an image fromwhich we read thepast, not the future.

REFERENCES

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