[Aztlan] cities in Amazonia

[BERNARD FONTANA]

Listeros interested in ths subject will find some useful observatiins in 
Stephen Nugent's "Scoping the Amazon: Image, Icon, Ethnography" (Walnut 
Creek, California: Left Coast Press, 2007).  One is reminded here that the 
power to defne is absolute power.
   Bunny Fontana, Ph.D.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Benjamin Carter" <spondylus.princeps at gmail.com>
To: "Diehl, Richard" <rdiehl at as.ua.edu>
Cc: <aztlan at lists.famsi.org>
Sent: Monday, September 21, 2009 6:24 PM
Subject: Re: [Aztlan] cities in Amazonia


> 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,
>>
>>
>>
>> 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
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