[Aztlan] cities in Amazonia

[Diehl, Richard]

Hola Listeros,



I would like to comment on Michael Smith's recent post concerning Michael Heckenberger's article in the latest Scientific American. Mike complained about the loose use of the term city and the danger that it will lose any real meaning if we continue to apply it to any settlement larger than a farmstead. I entirely agree with him, and after reading Heckenberger's article and numerous other of his publications on the Xingu region, I also agree that what he has found are not cities. I have wrestled with this same issue with regards to the Olmec centers of San Lorenzo and La Venta. In my book on the Olmecs, I finally decided to think of them as urban centers in at least an incipient way. I still wonder at times if I was correct or not.



I also must say that Heckenberger and his colleagues elsewhere in Amazonia have turned our understanding of the region's prehistory and historical period on its head. I spent a lot of time going through the literature on the subject last spring while preparing a course on the Anthropology of Amazonia and came away truly impressed with the new picture. Heckenberger summarizes it quite well in Sci Am article, an essay I recommend highly to anyone interested in the archeology of tropical America.

Dick Diehl