compost. William Balée, an ethnobotanist from Tulane University,
suggested that as much as a tenth of the upland forests of the Amazon, an
area the size of France, may have been nurtured in this manner by the
original inhabitants.
These observations led other scholars to question
traditional assumptions about the origins and impacts of slash-and-burn
agriculture. When I lived among the Waorani, a people who still had stone
tools at the time of contact, I often wondered how such an implement could
possibly fell tropical hardwoods that I, as a botanist and one-time logger,
could barely cut with a modern axe. Anthropologist Robert Carneiro pondered
the same question and decided to experiment. To cut down a 1-metre tree with
a stone axe took 115 hours, three weeks of eight-hour days. To clear a
half-hectare plot took the equivalent of 153 eight-hour days. According to
Betty Meggers and other authorities, such a field could only be worked
intensively for three years before being abandoned. Given other demands on
an individual’s time — hunting, fishing, ritual obligations — it would have
been totally impractical and utterly maladaptive to devote so much effort
for so little return. Rather than slash, burn, plant, harvest, and move on,
people would have had every incentive to stay put. Indeed, as geographer
William Denevan has written, “the picture of swidden, or slash and burn, as
an ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in timeless balance
with Nature is a total myth.” Slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon may
be a comparatively recent development, made possible by the post-contact
introduction of steel tools. It has become over time the agricultural
technology of the peripheral peoples of the basin, whose numbers are low,
and whose lands have been large enough to absorb its almost grotesque
inefficiencies. But clearly this was not the foundation of life among the
densely populated cultures we now know to have existed along the main
reaches of the Amazon.
Anthropologists today recognize that our
understanding of these ancient worlds has been for too long filtered through
our experience with the marginal societies that survived what was in fact a
holocaust. To understand the prehistory of the basin through this lens is
rather like attempting to reconstruct the history of the British Empire from
the perspective of the Hebrides after London had been wiped out by a nuclear
bomb. Within a century of contact, disease and slavery had swept away
millions of indigenous lives. And yet, incredibly, there is one place in the
Amazon where the rhythm of these great civilizations may still be felt and
heard, the homeland of an extraordinary complex of cultures known
collectively as the Peoples of the Anaconda.
IN 1975 WHEN I first travelled to the Northwest Amazon of
Colombia I stopped en route at Villavicencio, a small city nestled into the
eastern foothills of the Andes, to visit a legendary naturalist, Federico
Medem, a Latvian count who had fled the Russian Revolution and found a new
life in the forests of the tropical lowlands. He was an old friend of my
professor at university, Richard Evans Schultes, the botanical explorer who
had sparked the psychedelic movement with his discovery of the magic
mushrooms in Mexico in 1938, and later spent twelve uninterrupted years in
the most remote reaches of the Amazon. I found Dr. Medem in the evening at
his home, a rambling compound that resembled the quarters of an old rubber
trader. The house had wooden floors and a tin roof, an open veranda hung
with hammocks, and walls decorated with jaguar and bushmaster skins.
Overhead in his office a ceiling fan cast faint shadows across the desk as
he caressed an artifact or ran his fingers over a fading map drawn by hand a
century before. His most prized possession was a shaman’s necklace, a single
strand of palm fibre threaded through a 6-inch crystal of quartz. He
described it as both the penis and crystallized semen of
suggested that as much as a tenth of the upland forests of the Amazon, an
area the size of France, may have been nurtured in this manner by the
original inhabitants.
These observations led other scholars to question
traditional assumptions about the origins and impacts of slash-and-burn
agriculture. When I lived among the Waorani, a people who still had stone
tools at the time of contact, I often wondered how such an implement could
possibly fell tropical hardwoods that I, as a botanist and one-time logger,
could barely cut with a modern axe. Anthropologist Robert Carneiro pondered
the same question and decided to experiment. To cut down a 1-metre tree with
a stone axe took 115 hours, three weeks of eight-hour days. To clear a
half-hectare plot took the equivalent of 153 eight-hour days. According to
Betty Meggers and other authorities, such a field could only be worked
intensively for three years before being abandoned. Given other demands on
an individual’s time — hunting, fishing, ritual obligations — it would have
been totally impractical and utterly maladaptive to devote so much effort
for so little return. Rather than slash, burn, plant, harvest, and move on,
people would have had every incentive to stay put. Indeed, as geographer
William Denevan has written, “the picture of swidden, or slash and burn, as
an ancient practice by which Indians kept themselves in timeless balance
with Nature is a total myth.” Slash-and-burn agriculture in the Amazon may
be a comparatively recent development, made possible by the post-contact
introduction of steel tools. It has become over time the agricultural
technology of the peripheral peoples of the basin, whose numbers are low,
and whose lands have been large enough to absorb its almost grotesque
inefficiencies. But clearly this was not the foundation of life among the
densely populated cultures we now know to have existed along the main
reaches of the Amazon.
Anthropologists today recognize that our
understanding of these ancient worlds has been for too long filtered through
our experience with the marginal societies that survived what was in fact a
holocaust. To understand the prehistory of the basin through this lens is
rather like attempting to reconstruct the history of the British Empire from
the perspective of the Hebrides after London had been wiped out by a nuclear
bomb. Within a century of contact, disease and slavery had swept away
millions of indigenous lives. And yet, incredibly, there is one place in the
Amazon where the rhythm of these great civilizations may still be felt and
heard, the homeland of an extraordinary complex of cultures known
collectively as the Peoples of the Anaconda.
IN 1975 WHEN I first travelled to the Northwest Amazon of
Colombia I stopped en route at Villavicencio, a small city nestled into the
eastern foothills of the Andes, to visit a legendary naturalist, Federico
Medem, a Latvian count who had fled the Russian Revolution and found a new
life in the forests of the tropical lowlands. He was an old friend of my
professor at university, Richard Evans Schultes, the botanical explorer who
had sparked the psychedelic movement with his discovery of the magic
mushrooms in Mexico in 1938, and later spent twelve uninterrupted years in
the most remote reaches of the Amazon. I found Dr. Medem in the evening at
his home, a rambling compound that resembled the quarters of an old rubber
trader. The house had wooden floors and a tin roof, an open veranda hung
with hammocks, and walls decorated with jaguar and bushmaster skins.
Overhead in his office a ceiling fan cast faint shadows across the desk as
he caressed an artifact or ran his fingers over a fading map drawn by hand a
century before. His most prized possession was a shaman’s necklace, a single
strand of palm fibre threaded through a 6-inch crystal of quartz. He
described it as both the penis and crystallized semen of
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