[Aztlan] Pre-Columbian Amazonian Populations

[michael ruggeri]

Contact: karen Rhine
krhine at fit.edu
321-674-8964
Florida Institute of Technology
Paper challenges 1491 Amazonian population theories

Much of Amazonian Basin not well-populated -- No 'built landscape'

There's a scholarly debate brewing about whether pre-Columbian  
Amazonian populations settled in large numbers across Amazonia and  
created the modern forest setting that many conservationists take to  
be ‘natural.'

This view has become fashionable among many archaeologists and  
anthropologists, and is challenged in a recent paper from Dr. Mark  
Bush of the Florida Institute of Technology. The findings of Bush’s  
research may rekindle a debate has major implications for land use  
and policy-setting in the rain forest.

"We don't contradict that there were major settlements in key areas  
flanking the Amazon Channel -- there could have been millions of  
people living there," says Mark Bush, a British-born paleo-ecologist  
who travels to extremely remote rain forest locations to collect core  
samples from ancient lakes. He then analyzes those samples for pollen  
and charcoal and thus is able to conclude with a high degree of  
accuracy the extent of human settlement in that region.

"What we do say is that when you start to look away from known  
settlements, you may see very long-term local use," he says. "These  
people didn't stray very far from home, or from local bodies of water  
for several thousands of years. We looked at clusters of lakes and  
landscapes where people lived, and asked, did they leave their  
homesite to farm around other nearby lakes? No they didn't. These  
findings argue for a very localized use of Amazonian forest resources  
outside the main, known, archaeological areas."

Bush says the evidence comes from a geographically diverse area:  
three districts, each with 3 (in two cases) or four lakes.

"In each we have one lake occupied and used, and the others little  
used or not used at all," he says. "So this is a total of 10 lakes  
that provide three separate instances -- one in Brazil, one in  
Ecuador and one in Peru, where there is evidence of long, continuous  
occupation of more than 5,000 years that did not spread to the  
adjacent, 8 to 10 kilometer distant lakes."

The findings are published in a paper titled "Holocene fire and  
occupation in Amazonia: records from two lake districts" that appears  
in a recent issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society  
of London B: Biological Sciences. Bush says this paper, and another  
forthcoming in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment,  
have important policy implications.

That's because the hypothesis of human-manufactured landscapes has  
been made popular by Charles Mann’s book - 1491: New Revelations of  
the Americas Before Columbus – and could influence conservation  
policy in the Americas. That millions of people once populated the  
Americas, and that in Amazonia, at least, the rainforest is the  
product of long term human use, has been used as farmers and loggers  
as justification for clearcutting rainforests. Their argument, that  
the ecosystem already experienced vast landscape disturbance and  
proved resilient, relies on the ubiquitous influence of Pre-Columbian  
people, the suggestion that Bush’s work rejects.

"These data are directly relevant to the resilience of Amazonian  
conservation, as they do not support the contention that all of  
Amazonia is a 'built landscape' and therefore a product of past human  
land use," Bush says. "Most archaeologists are buying into the  
argument that you had big populations that transformed the landscape  
en masse. Another group of archaeologists say that transformation was  
very much limited to river corridors, and if you went away from the  
river corridors there wasn't that much impact. That's what our  
findings tend to support."

Bush doesn't expect that his new findings will settle the debate,  
however.

"There's just too much passion on this issue. People who are inclined  
to believe what we're talking about will say this is very strong  
evidence, and say 'let's have more.' The archaeologists will say this  
study only examines two districts."

Bush himself calls the paper, co-authored with Claudia Listopad,  
William D. Gosling, and Christopher Williams of Florida Tech, Paulo  
E. de Oliveira of Universidade do Guarulhos in Brazil, Miles R.  
Silman and Carolyn Krisel of Wake Forest and Mauro B. de Toledo of  
Florida Tech and Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil, an  
important first step in making the case, through core sampling and  
pollen and charcoal analysis of sediment from seven lake bottoms,  
three in one district, four in the other, that much of Amazonia has  
not been transformed by human actions, and ideally should be kept  
that way, to preserve species biodiversity.

"The way to see this is as a sneak peak," he says. "It's a new way to  
look at landscapes and it's a new tool. The study needs to be  
replicated in more places before people will be persuaded, but it's  
certainly a warning shot across the bow."

"While the majority of archaeologists argue the rivers were the major  
conduit for populations," he adds, "there is an increasing  
vocalization that there was much more widespread habitat  
transformation; that you still had a bulk of people along the river  
but their influence extended deep into the forest. It's still  
nebulous, and difficult to get people to map stuff, or put hard  
numbers on it, but there is a sentiment that the Amazonia has been  
disturbed and that the view of the Amazonian rainforest as a built  
landscape is gaining momentum. There are extremes at either ends, and  
the majority of people are in middle but there's a tendency of  
drifting toward the high end."

For example, he says 1950s population estimates were 1 million, in  
the 70s that estimate drifted up to 4 million; and in the 1990s  
drifted up to 10 million.

"We've now got a polarized community," he says.

At one end, he says, is Anna Roosevelt of the Field Museum in Chicago  
(she argues for large populations dispersed throughout Amazonia); at  
the other is Betty Meggers at Smithsonian (she argues these were very  
primitive people with low population).

Mark's studies are the first to apply core sampling methodology to  
determine through coal and pollen levels, how much human activity was  
going on.

###
on the web: http://research.fit.edu/bushlab/



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