1491 (54 page)

Betty Meggers

In a boldly written article in
American Anthropologist
in 1954, Meggers proclaimed the implications:

There is a force at work to which man through his culture must bow. This determinant operates uniformly regardless of time, place (within the forest), psychology or race. Its leveling effect appears to be inescapable. Even modern efforts to implant civilization in the South American tropical forest have met with defeat, or survive only with constant assistance from the outside. In short, the environmental potential of the tropical forest is sufficient to allow the evolution of culture to proceed only to the level represented by [slash-and-burn farmers]; further indigenous evolution is impossible, and any more highly evolved culture attempting to settle and maintain itself in the tropical forest environment will inevitably decline to the [slash-and-burn] level.

The impossibility of passing beyond slash-and-burn, Meggers said, was a consequence of a more general “law of environmental limitation of culture.” And she stated the law, italicizing its importance: “
The level to which a culture can develop is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies.
”

How did Marajó escape, even temporarily, the iron grasp of its environment? And why was there no sign of its initial climb past ecological limits, only of its subsequent collapse before them? Meggers and Evans provided the answers three years later in an influential monograph. Marajó, they said, was not actually an Amazonian society. In fact, it was a failed cutting from a more sophisticated culture in the Andes, a cousin of Wari or Tiwanaku. Stranded in the wet desert of the Amazon, the culture struggled to gain its footing, tottered a few steps, and died.

Counterfeit Paradise
was the product of more than twenty years of research. But that was not the sole reason for the book’s influence. Meggers’s message of limitation, published within a year of the first Earth Day, resonated in the ears of readers newly converted to the ecological movement. Since then countless campaigns to save the rainforest have driven home its lesson: development in tropical forests destroys both forests and their developers. Promulgated in ecology textbooks, Meggers’s argument became a wellspring of the campaign to save rainforests, one of the few times in recent history that humankind has actually tried to profit from the lessons of the past.

Yet even as the themes of
Counterfeit Paradise
spread to the worlds of natural science and political activism, Meggers’s ideas exerted ever-diminishing influence in archaeology itself. From her distinguished post at the Smithsonian, she battled on behalf of the law of environmental limitation. But her main accomplishment may have been inadvertently to keep new ideas about Amazonian history from the public eye—ideas about its past that may, according to their advocates, play a role in safeguarding its future.

PAINTED ROCK CAVE

“Rather than admiration or enthusiasm,” the great Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, “the feeling that overtakes one when first encountering the Amazon is foremost one of disappointment.” Like today’s ecotourism brochures, the accounts of the great river basin in da Cunha’s time celebrated its immensity but rarely dwelled on its extreme flatness—in the Amazon’s first 2,900 miles the vertical drop is only 500 feet. “It is as though the place lacks vertical lines,” da Cunha complained. “In a few hours the observer gives in to the fatigue of the unnatural monotony.” Every year the river floods—not a disaster, but a season. A channel that is one mile wide in the dry season can become thirty miles wide in the wet. After five months the water recedes, leaving behind a layer of rich sediment. From the air, the river seems to ooze like dirty metal through a wash of green utterly devoid of the romantic crags, arroyos, and heights that signify wildness and natural spectacle to most people of European descent.

The area around the lower-Amazon city of Santarém is an exception. West of town, the Tapajós pours into the Amazon from the south, creating an inland bay that at high water is fifteen miles wide and a hundred miles long. The flood rises high enough to cover low river islands in knee-deep water, leaving their trees to stand out like miracles in mid-channel. Fishers from town ride their bicycles into little boats, parking the bikes while working by hanging them in the offshore trees. The bay is lined with bluffs high enough to cast long shadows. Almost five hundred years ago, Indians lined the edge of the rise, taunting Orellana by waving palm fronds.

On the opposite, northern side of the river are a series of sandstone ridges that reach down from the Guiana Shield in the north, halting close to the water’s edge. Five hundred feet high and more, they rise above the canopy like old tombstones. Many of the caves in the buttes are splattered with ancient pictographs—rock paintings of hands, stars, frogs, and human figures, all reminiscent of Joan Miró, in overlapping red and yellow and brown. In the 1990s one of these caves, Caverna da Pedra Pintada—Painted Rock Cave—drew considerable attention in archaeological circles.

Wide and shallow and well lighted, Painted Rock Cave is less thronged with bats than some of the other caves. The arched entrance is twenty feet high and electric with gaudy imagery. Out front is a sunny natural patio, suitable for picnicking, that is edged by a few big rocks. During my visit I ate a sandwich atop a particularly inviting stone and looked through a stand of peach palms over the treetops to the water seven miles away. The people who created the petroglyphs, I thought, must have done about the same thing.

Painted Rock Cave has attracted scientists since the mid-nineteenth century, when Alfred Russel Wallace visited it. Wallace, a naturalist, was more interested in the palm trees outside the caves than the people who had lived inside them. The latter were left to an archaeologist, Anna C. Roosevelt, then at the Field Museum. To her exasperation, press accounts of Roosevelt’s work often stress her descent from Theodore Roosevelt (she is his great-granddaughter), as if her lineage were more noteworthy than her accomplishments. In truth, though, she has demonstrated something of her ancestor’s flare for drama and controversy.

Roosevelt first came to public attention when she reexcavated Marajó in the 1980s. By using a battery of new remote-sensing techniques—including total-station topographic mapping, ground-penetrating radar, and scanning for slight variations in magnetic field strength, electrical conductivity, and electrical resistance—she was able to build up a picture of Marajó far more detailed than Meggers and Evans could have in the 1940s and 1950s, when they worked there. Detailed—and different.

Published in 1991, Roosevelt’s initial report on Marajó was like the antimatter version of
Counterfeit Paradise.
A few scientists had challenged Meggers’s ideas; Roosevelt excoriated them from top to bottom. Far from being a failed offshoot of another, higher culture, she concluded, Marajó was “one of the outstanding indigenous cultural achievements of the New World,” a powerhouse that lasted for more than a thousand years, had “possibly well over 100,000” inhabitants, and covered thousands of square miles. Rather than damaging the forest, Marajó’s “large population, highly intensive subsistence, [and] major systems of public works” had
improved
it: the places formerly occupied by the Marajóara showed the most luxuriant and diverse growth. “If you listened to Meggers’s theory, these places should have been ruined,” Roosevelt told me.

Rather than pressing down on Marajó, she said, the river and forest opened up possibilities. In highland Mexico, “it wasn’t easy to get away from other people. With all those rocky hillsides and deserts, you couldn’t readily start over. But in the Amazon, you
could
run away—strike off in your canoe and be gone.”

As in
Huckleberry Finn?
I asked.

 

In this reconstruction based on archaeologist Anna Roosevelt’s view of Marajóara society, houses cluster on artificial platforms above the wet ground while farm fields stretch into the island’s interior.

 

“If you like,” she said. “You could go [along the river] where you wanted and homestead—the forest gives you all kinds of fruit and animals, the river gives you fish and plants. That was very important to societies like Marajó. They had to be much less coercive, much more hang-loose, much more socially fluid, or people wouldn’t stay there.” Compared with much of the rest of the world at that time, people in the Amazon “were freer, they were healthier, they were living in a really wonderful civilization.”

Marajó never had the grand public monuments of a Tenochtitlan or a Qosqo, Roosevelt noted, because its leaders “couldn’t compel the labor.” Nonetheless, she said, Marajó society was “just as orderly and beautiful and complex. The eye-opener was that you didn’t need a huge apparatus of state control to have all that. And this had been entirely missed by Meggers, who couldn’t see past her environmental-determinist theories. And I said so much in my book.”

Meggers reacted to Roosevelt’s critiques by sneering at her “polemical tone” and “extravagant claims.” In concluding that large areas of Marajó had been continuously inhabited, Roosevelt had (according to Meggers) committed the beginner’s error of confusing a site that had been occupied many times by small, unstable groups for a single, long-lasting society. Cultural remains, Meggers explained to me, “build up on areas of half a kilometer or so, because [shifting Indian groups] don’t land exactly on the same spot. The decorated types of pottery don’t change much over time, so you can pick up a bunch of chips and say, ‘Oh, look, it was all one big site!’ Unless you know what you’re doing, of course.” From her point of view, claiming that Amazonian societies could escape their environmental constraints was little more than a display of scientific ignorance, the archaeological version of trying to design perpetual-motion machines.

Anna Roosevelt

To Meggers’s critics, the ecological-limits argument was not only wrong, but
familiar—
and familiar in an uncomfortable way. From the first days of contact, Europeans have perceived the Indians of the tropics as living in timeless stasis. Michel de Montaigne admiringly claimed in 1580 that the inhabitants of the Amazon had “no knowledge of numbers, no terms for governor or political superior, no practice of subordination or of riches or poverty…no clothing, no agriculture, no metals.” They abided, he said, “without toil or travail” in a “bounteous” forest that “furnishes them abundantly with all they need…. They are still in that blessed state of desiring nothing beyond what is ordained by their natural necessities: for them anything further is merely superfluous.”

Montaigne’s successors quickly turned his views upside-down. Like him, they viewed Amazonians as existing outside history, but they now regarded this as a bad thing. The French natural historian Charles Marie de la Condamine retraced Orellana’s journey in 1743. He emerged with great regard for the forest—and none for its inhabitants. The peoples of the Peruvian Amazon were nothing more than “forest animals,” he said. “Before making them Christians, they must first be made human.” In softened form, Condamine’s views persisted into the twentieth century. “Where man has remained in the tropics, with few exceptions, he has suffered arrested development,” the prominent geographer Ellen Churchill Semple remarked in 1911. “His nursery has kept him a child.” To be sure, advocates of environmental limitations today do not endorse the racist views of the past, but they still regard the original inhabitants of the Amazon as trapped in their environment like flies in amber. Meggers’s “law of environmental limitation of culture,” her critics in essence say, is nothing but a green variant of Holmberg’s Mistake.