them to
death. The Waorani, incidentally, did not spear only outsiders, all of whom
they considered to be
cowade
, or cannibals. They speared one
another. Fully 54 percent of their mortality over eight generations resulted
from intratribal spearing raids.
The Waorani were and are an exceptional people,
and their history is in many ways unique. But at the same time they fit a
basic pattern shared by many of the marginal societies — marginal only in
the sense that they lived literally at the margins of the basin. These
cultures were for the most part small in numbers, without hierarchy or
intense specialization. They tended to be acephalous, lacking overt
political leaders, and perhaps most characteristically, they were
endogamous. They married amongst themselves, living in isolation and often
in open conflict with their neighbours. They had, of course, extraordinary
gifts. Waorani hunters could smell animal urine at forty paces in the forest
and identify the species. Through generations of empirical observation and
experimentation, they had learned to manipulate plants with considerable
skill. Poisons from plants enabled them to fish and hunt. Hallucinogenic
preparations such as ayahuasca revealed levels of alchemical genius beyond
the reach or understanding of science. And in making a living in the forest,
they had found a way through slash-and-burn agriculture to grow food despite
the nutrient-poor soils. Small plots cut from the forest were fired and
burned, planted and harvested with ever-diminishing returns for perhaps
three years, and then abandoned to be reclaimed by the forest. All of this
activity was critically dependent on population density. Too many people
would result in too many fields with no time for the vegetation to
regenerate, the exhaustion of the land, and the saturation of the carrying
capacity of the environment.
To a remarkable extent, this cultural scenario
became the filter through which anthropologists understood indigenous life
in the Amazon. Societies, it was implied, clung precariously to a perilous
existence, constrained always by the environment and its limitations. In
1971, Betty Meggers, a highly regarded archaeologist at the Smithsonian
Institution, published
Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit
Paradise
, a book that became required reading in virtually every
introductory anthropology course on South America. Meggers depicted a world
of small hunting and gathering societies, virtually unchanged in centuries,
none of which could possibly have supported more than a thousand people, a
figure she determined arbitrarily. Higher populations, she suggested, might
have occurred on the floodplain of the lower river, as indeed Gaspar de
Carvajal had reported, but evidence was vague and imprecise, and all along
the main trunk of the river “the aboriginal cultural pattern had been
completely destroyed within 150 years of its discovery.”
But had it? Preservation of archaeological
remains had been as much of a problem in the Amazon as it was in Polynesia.
But beginning in the 1980s new techniques unveiled unexpected worlds.
Working on the island of Marajó in the delta, archaeologists, Anna Roosevelt
in particular, found evidence of a complex culture, perhaps as many as a
hundred thousand people spread over thousands of square kilometres that had
persisted for at least a thousand years. Near the city of Manaus at the
confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, massive earthen burial mounds,
dating to ad 1000, provided evidence that whoever had occupied the land had
exploited some 138 domesticated plants, most of which were fruit trees and
palms. Botanists and ecologists, meanwhile, were discovering throughout the
Amazon curious anomalies, large but isolated expanses of
terra
preta
, black soil, clearly of human origins, showing that people
had in fact stayed put, and actively worked to enhance the agricultural
potential of the land, with charcoal for nutrient retention, organic waste
as
death. The Waorani, incidentally, did not spear only outsiders, all of whom
they considered to be
cowade
, or cannibals. They speared one
another. Fully 54 percent of their mortality over eight generations resulted
from intratribal spearing raids.
The Waorani were and are an exceptional people,
and their history is in many ways unique. But at the same time they fit a
basic pattern shared by many of the marginal societies — marginal only in
the sense that they lived literally at the margins of the basin. These
cultures were for the most part small in numbers, without hierarchy or
intense specialization. They tended to be acephalous, lacking overt
political leaders, and perhaps most characteristically, they were
endogamous. They married amongst themselves, living in isolation and often
in open conflict with their neighbours. They had, of course, extraordinary
gifts. Waorani hunters could smell animal urine at forty paces in the forest
and identify the species. Through generations of empirical observation and
experimentation, they had learned to manipulate plants with considerable
skill. Poisons from plants enabled them to fish and hunt. Hallucinogenic
preparations such as ayahuasca revealed levels of alchemical genius beyond
the reach or understanding of science. And in making a living in the forest,
they had found a way through slash-and-burn agriculture to grow food despite
the nutrient-poor soils. Small plots cut from the forest were fired and
burned, planted and harvested with ever-diminishing returns for perhaps
three years, and then abandoned to be reclaimed by the forest. All of this
activity was critically dependent on population density. Too many people
would result in too many fields with no time for the vegetation to
regenerate, the exhaustion of the land, and the saturation of the carrying
capacity of the environment.
To a remarkable extent, this cultural scenario
became the filter through which anthropologists understood indigenous life
in the Amazon. Societies, it was implied, clung precariously to a perilous
existence, constrained always by the environment and its limitations. In
1971, Betty Meggers, a highly regarded archaeologist at the Smithsonian
Institution, published
Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit
Paradise
, a book that became required reading in virtually every
introductory anthropology course on South America. Meggers depicted a world
of small hunting and gathering societies, virtually unchanged in centuries,
none of which could possibly have supported more than a thousand people, a
figure she determined arbitrarily. Higher populations, she suggested, might
have occurred on the floodplain of the lower river, as indeed Gaspar de
Carvajal had reported, but evidence was vague and imprecise, and all along
the main trunk of the river “the aboriginal cultural pattern had been
completely destroyed within 150 years of its discovery.”
But had it? Preservation of archaeological
remains had been as much of a problem in the Amazon as it was in Polynesia.
But beginning in the 1980s new techniques unveiled unexpected worlds.
Working on the island of Marajó in the delta, archaeologists, Anna Roosevelt
in particular, found evidence of a complex culture, perhaps as many as a
hundred thousand people spread over thousands of square kilometres that had
persisted for at least a thousand years. Near the city of Manaus at the
confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, massive earthen burial mounds,
dating to ad 1000, provided evidence that whoever had occupied the land had
exploited some 138 domesticated plants, most of which were fruit trees and
palms. Botanists and ecologists, meanwhile, were discovering throughout the
Amazon curious anomalies, large but isolated expanses of
terra
preta
, black soil, clearly of human origins, showing that people
had in fact stayed put, and actively worked to enhance the agricultural
potential of the land, with charcoal for nutrient retention, organic waste
as
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