[Aztlan] cities in Amazonia

[Benjamin Carter]

Listeros,

I too agree with the post regarding cities/ urbanism. The term doesn't 
mean much to me without direct comparisons with structure and population 
density comparisons with other "cities" or settlements.

I would, however, like to heartily cheer the work that Heckenberger and 
Clark Ericson (and others) have done in the Amazon Basin. It really 
tears apart the whole idea of "saving the rainforest", which means 
returning or keeping it in a state of "nature". As these studies make 
abundantly clear, much,  if not all, of the Amazon Basin is the result 
of human/nature interaction so that trying to understand what is truly 
natural and what should be preserved becomes more difficult. If many of 
these environments were anthropogenic, then how do "we" save "them"? I 
love teaching about this because it really turns students beliefs about 
the Amazon upside down. The idea that "we" should buy up and preserve 
the Amazon (my own sons we exposed to a school program to buy one square 
foot of the rainforest) while kicking out its long-term residents in 
order to "save" it is ethnocentric.

On a secondary note, Charles Mann has also done an excellent job 
popularizing this situation, as does Heckenberger's article in SciAm. I 
offer up hardy cheers for overturning ethnocentrism at its deepest.

Ben Carter, PhD, RPA

Diehl, Richard wrote:
> Hola Listeros,
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>
>
> 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.
>
>
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> 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
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