Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes

Part II. Contact and Attrition

part II Contact and Attrition Overview By the beginning of the twenty-­ first century, a definitive picture was beginning to emerge of indigenous occupations of diverse landscapes in Amazonia. It was becoming clear that the concept of forests that had been altered in terms of their soils and biota by indigenous peoples over hundreds of years was not only plausible , but even likely. But when I first set foot in the Amazon, at age twenty-­ four in July 1979, which is when I also first visited a village of Ka’apor Indians for one day only, to begin a feasibility study for doctoral dissertation research, I took with me what I had learned in anthropology while a graduate student at Columbia University ,namely,thatindigenousAmazonianpopulationsweresmall,scattered,and lacking in centralized leadership and planning. The reason they were like that was that they were putatively subject to limitations of Amazonian nature. These limitations were widely thought to be found in the mostly poor and infertile soils, inappropriate for intensive agriculture, and hence incapable of supporting large populations that otherwise might have had noticeable effects on their surroundings , and that would have begotten truly built environments. In addition to inhibitive soil conditions, the environmental limitations on human society were at one point thought to be based on protein scarcities (Gross 1975, 1979, 1982; cf. Beckerman 1980), intrinsic to a dense tropical rainforest. The theory seemed appealing , since because people had not domesticated any fauna to speak of and because their crops were mainly starchy, not protein rich, they had to keep moving their small settlements in search of new game supplies. Such movements, either be- 72 Contact and Attrition cause of impoverished soil or low protein supplies, were not conducive to the rise of complex sedentary society, urbanism, and civilization, as we knew it, and that is whynoneofthesewerefoundinAmazonia,atleastnotintheAmazoniaviewedin the present time, or the ethnographic present. Environmental limitation was also a convenientwayofexplainingwhyonefoundhunter-­gatherers(egalitarian,mobile, low-­density, nonagricultural people) and horticultural village societies only, as the native populations of that region. The view that Amazonian Indians were essentially constrained in their social and po­liti­cal organization by environmental limitations came from a point of view known as cultural ecology, an influential paradigm in Ameri­can anthropology during the sec­ond half of the twentieth century. The problem was—as first noted by a luminary who had been schooled in it, Eric Wolf—it could not well explicate the empirical findings about the origins of Amazonian forests that were beginning to emerge by the late 1980s and were flourishing by the end of the 1990s. These findings, as the preceding chapters suggest, had demonstrated indigenous societies that actually changed forests, and that forests once classified as primary and pristine were, in fact, nothing more than artificial landscapes that had resulted from human interventions of the past. Cultural-­ ecological understandings of Amazonian forests, peoples, and societies were part of a broader perspective in both archaeology and cultural anthropology that has come to be called the adaptationist or standard model (Stahl 2002; Viveiros de Castro 1996). It is blind to human agency, if the agency is egalitarian, hunter-­ gatherer, horticultural, or in some other way not complex or stratified. If people could have altered the structure and composition of native forests, and turn them into cultural forests, why could they not do the same with poor soils and limited protein? The evidence on soils is that of course they did modify these, sometimes significantly, in diverse patches across the Amazon Basin, creating new soil types known collectively today as Amazonian Dark Earths (Glaser andWoods2004;Lehmannetal.2003;Smith1980;Sombroek1966;Woodsand McCann 1999; Woods et al. 2009). Protein limitation was a moot point in light of the fact that people could grow proteinaceous crops, such as maize, on these soils, as origi­ nally noted by Stephen Beckerman (1979); in addition, their very gardens attracted rather than repelled game, in­ clud­ ing deer and other important mammals, in the context of garden hunting, an insight pioneered by Olga Linares­ (Linares 1976) (see Chapter 2). These forests also contained evidence of many useful tree species. In fact, so useful were cultural forests, which were the artifacts of agricultural settlements, of the sort described in Chapter 1, that hunters and gatherers actually preferred to make their temporary campsites in these forests. And because these forests were not actually pristine, it could not be any longer sustained on empirical grounds that hunters and gatherers based their livelihoods on wild species from...