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Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

science.org

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Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#121

Post by graemep »

curioadu wrote: post #95
culi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's true. Mesoamerica had a very rich tradition of papermaking (Amatl) that predated paper in Europe (though probably not Chinese). Colonists severely repressed, criminalized, and even destroyed the paper and writing systems. Thousands of Maya codices were burned in 1562. Almost all pre-colombian libraries ( amoxcalli ) were destroyed We've deciphered Nahuatl and Maya script but Zapotec, Olmec, Isthm…

The destruction during the Spanish conquests of the Aztecs and others was terrible. It was also rather disorganized initially, especially due to the huge delays regarding communication between the Americas and Europe. In regards to paper, while the Aztecs had impressive achievements, especially considering the almost complete isolation of the Americas from the rest of the world (is there any civilization close to the…

> is there any civilization close to the achievements of the Aztecs and other Amerindians in Africa south of Egypt?

Aksum for a start.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#122

Post by I-M-S »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #101
culi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes exactly. The myths of native people being hyperegalitarian, one-with-nature types started because colonists came upon cultures in the North East woodlands. Those same people, just a few decades before that were living in Cahokia which was at one point larger than any city in Europe. It was a massive urban city that was also very hierarchical. The hyperegalitarian Algonquian and Haudenosaunee/Iroquois people were…

The Iroquois had slaves, they weren't hyperegalitarian.

The Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than that of First Nations.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#123

Post by modo_mario »

tkel wrote: post #91
ErigmolCt wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse

The lesson is more that indigenous people were (+ are) part of the ecology, not separate from it or above it. With cultural, social, technological, and spiritual practices that were formed dialectically and hyper-locally with the ecology, as a result of it, and as part of it. Often considered a keystone species in these ecologies.

Indigenous people in north america contributed to multiple extinctions.

This is the noble savage trope you're putting on display

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#124

Post by charlieyu1 »

Terr_ wrote: post #48
smt88 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline literally says they lived in 3% of the forest area, which implies that the vast majority of the rest of the forest actually was untouched

Perhaps, but was it untouched by design, or was it untouched because it wasn't economically feasible for them to exploit it? Those two are very very different when it comes to assigning virtuous environmental brownie-points, and the latter is the default across most civilizations ever known.

I’d assume it was unnecessary because food needs were already satisfied plus the danger from deeper parts of the forest.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#125

Post by digitalsurgeonz »

dyauspitr wrote: post #3

It’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.

yes the disease like European virus which killed the natives in cold blood.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#126

Post by tdiff »

dyauspitr wrote: post #3

It’s so crazy that they all just… died because of the old world diseases before anyone really got a chance to meet them as a civilization.

I've always imaginged that Amazonia is a hive of all types of diseases. I'd rather wonder how did they manage to survive there.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#127

Post by tkel »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #112
curioadu wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some ways I agree with you, but I also think that the other commenter indirectly might uncover some insights. For instance, Australian Aboriginals mighy have historically both; fire-stick farmed ("farming" in the sense of clearing land for animals to hunt, apart from some foraging, as far as I can tell) so much and in such a large area that both large animal species and perhaps some plant species went extinct or w…

Of course, but that's no different than the changes brought on by urbanization or climate change due to carbon emissions.

Seems as though you are intentionally misunderstanding me. Urbanization is a practice that humans developed without ecological integration, it is a practice of subjugating or disregarding the surrounding ecology, and extermination of most of life within an ecosystem. As opposed to living within an ecosystem for thousands of years, not above or apart from it, most indigenous human societies in the Americas developed in such a way that is compatible and unique to it's hyperlocal ecological niche.

Do you rely on the surrounding plants and animals in your area for sustenance, creating tools, daily life, etc? You do not, that's what I mean by living above/apart. Living in this way does not lead to an ecological society or a shared knowledge base of the surrounding ecology. Do your spiritual and cultural practices involve or integrate that reliance in some way? That's what I'm getting at.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#128

Post by suddenlybananas »

I-M-S wrote: post #122
suddenlybananas wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Iroquois had slaves, they weren't hyperegalitarian.

The Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than tha…

Did those people have the right to leave or do what they wanted?

https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790?seq=1 Read this paper and the contemporary accounts and tell me that's not slavery.

>To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination.

>Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both

If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#129

Post by t-3 »

vasusen wrote: post #66
khanhnguyen8386 wrote: post #39

The myth of the 'pristine, untouched Amazon' was always a European trope. Lidar is proving that ancient civilizations were sophisticated ecosystem engineers, shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.

Yes, few years ago I was really surprised to learn that much of highly fertile amazon soil patches were created by humans using biochar. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

Unintentionally. People have been mixing biochar into soil for fertility since the beginning of agriculture with slash-and-burn, but terra preta is the result of waste dumps (human waste, ashes, bones, pottery, other garbage) in settlements composting, not something people were intentionally creating.

Re: Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

#130

Post by boomlinde »

sophrosyne42 wrote: post #115
boomlinde wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I confused you for another user. Still, I don't get where "virtuous environmental brownie-points" enter the discussion or how the first reply pertains to them. It seems like a simple factual statement that is either true or false and can be evaluated as such without invoking virtuous brownie points. That the Amazon remained largely untouched is true regardless of whether that was the result of a deliberate effo…

> It can simultaneously be true that the populated areas of the Amazon where deliberately and carefully managed by the population and that the Amazon was largely untouched for any other reason. Certainly, though nothing about the quoted fact that 97% of forest was uninhabited should lead us to make statements like "the pristine untouched Amazon idea is a European myth", nor does it give any information to go off of r…

Perhaps they weren't basing their statement on the "quoted fact" which was later posted in response to their statement (which FWIW isn't factual; as someone else points out this was not the only Amazonian civilization).
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