The link below leads to an article by Clark L. Erikson, with the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. It is part of a relatively new line of scholarship that establishes a very different view of the Pre-Columbia new world than what we were all taught in school.
According to this new line of research, Pre-Columbian populations were larger than we've been taught, and had a substantial impact on their world, such that by the time the Europeans reached the new world they were looking at a landscape already substantially transformed by long generations of humans living there. It is a fascinating area of scholarship.
Here's an excerpt from the article (linked below):
"Despite early historical accounts by eyewitnesses describing still flourishing complex societies in numerous locations throughout the Amazon and adjacent Neotropics, the indigenous societies ravaged by conquest, epidemics, exploitation, wars, and colonial policies encountered by later historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, and travelers were interpreted as representative of their ancestors. The environment of the Amazon region of tropical South America was long considered to be of limited potential for cultural development. As a result, scholars assumed that the simple social and political organization, nomadic or semi-sedentary lifeways characterized by hunting, gathering, fishing, and small-scale agriculture of the historic and contemporary native peoples reflected pre-Columbian conditions. These traditional interpretations feed the myths of low pre-Columbian human populations, a pristine environment, and the ecologically noble savage through their ignoring of or misreading the complex signatures of the human history embedded in the landscapes of Amazonia."
Diversity | Free Full-Text | The Transformation of Environment into Landscape: The Historical Ecology of Monumental Earthwork Construction in the Bolivian Amazon
According to this new line of research, Pre-Columbian populations were larger than we've been taught, and had a substantial impact on their world, such that by the time the Europeans reached the new world they were looking at a landscape already substantially transformed by long generations of humans living there. It is a fascinating area of scholarship.
Here's an excerpt from the article (linked below):
"Despite early historical accounts by eyewitnesses describing still flourishing complex societies in numerous locations throughout the Amazon and adjacent Neotropics, the indigenous societies ravaged by conquest, epidemics, exploitation, wars, and colonial policies encountered by later historians, ethnographers, archaeologists, and travelers were interpreted as representative of their ancestors. The environment of the Amazon region of tropical South America was long considered to be of limited potential for cultural development. As a result, scholars assumed that the simple social and political organization, nomadic or semi-sedentary lifeways characterized by hunting, gathering, fishing, and small-scale agriculture of the historic and contemporary native peoples reflected pre-Columbian conditions. These traditional interpretations feed the myths of low pre-Columbian human populations, a pristine environment, and the ecologically noble savage through their ignoring of or misreading the complex signatures of the human history embedded in the landscapes of Amazonia."
Diversity | Free Full-Text | The Transformation of Environment into Landscape: The Historical Ecology of Monumental Earthwork Construction in the Bolivian Amazon