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

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191–200 of 222 posts

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

#191
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. >Vil…

I put much more credence into lived experiences than into academic journals. There's plethora of examples in which children/teens of the settlers taken by First Nations would refuse to go back (especially females, which had little rights in the American society back then). Conversely, First Nations children/teens that were taken by the settlers would almost without exception risk life and limb to escape their newfoun…

There are a plethora of examples of slavery as well....

>The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times.

>In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman's clan. More typically, tribes took women and children captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans...

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

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has nothing to do with "noble savage" or whatever other ideologically loaded words you want to surgically introduce to manipulate people's opinions. Humans are the apex predator. They have a huge influence on whatever the downstream ecological equilibrium winds up being. This is hardest to deny in formerly glaciated regions because humans were there exerting pressure on the ecosystem the day after the glacier le…

Nah, I was adressing the idiology already present there. I don't dispute that humans are in essence a keystone species, part of nature, etc, etc but the OP talked about indiginous people specifically. We can just as easily say that the japanese were ecologically compatible....up to a point. The only reason it's brought up is due the idea of the indiginous in tune with nature who was essentially not limited in his abi…

Shouldn't you consider individual populations, cultures separately, and not be lumping all native people's together? One can do something another didn't.

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

#193
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 Haudenosaunee are radically democratic, place a very strong focus on gender equality, and possess then-unmatched levels of horizontal power-sharing

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

#194
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall reading of somewhat similar rotational cropping traditions indigenous to Africa though those centered mostly around root crops like yams. Modern smallholder farms still often practice rotational cropping because of this history (something which the west has only relatively recently come around on). East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usua…

> East Africa practiced stuff like homegardens which can be complex, multi-layered agroforestry systems that usually surround homesteads. I've heard the Hausa traditionally did something similar. Homegardens seem much smaller in scale than large-scale chinampas as practiced by the Aztecs, right?

They are larger than you'd think. A couple acres. But chinampas are definitely in another league

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

#195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention The weather there is quite brutal. Roads need tons of maintenance to remain passable. This is one of the reasons rivers are such an important transportation network. > Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes This is an interesting expl…

To add to that, most of their structures in the Amazon would have undoubtedly been built by wood (plentiful) rather than stone (scarce). Also, I think 30 years of a field being abandoned in the Amazon is likely more than enough for it to return fully to jungle. It's not like explorers were running around counting tree rings.

Actually, the vast majority of structures are earthen. Even the article states as much

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

#196
I recommend the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann to those of you who find this interesting. I loved it!

From wikipedia: > The book presents recent research findings from different fields which suggest human populations in the Western Hemisphere—that is, the Indigenous peoples of the Americas—were more numerous, had arrived earlier, were more sophisticated culturally, and controlled and shaped the natural landscape to a greater extent than scholars had previously thought.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_A...

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

#198
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please reread the comment you just responded to. I said it was remarkable (as in, worthy to be remarked) that these practices happened both in urban and non-urban cultures. The North American cities were certainly more advanced in terms of sanitation than anything in Europe at the time. You had stuff like dual aquaducts differentiating drinking water from washing water and public cleaning crews and urban waste maange…

The Aztecs were in Central America, not North America. Recall the quote from Britannica (your cite): "No native writing system was known among Indigenous peoples of North America at the time of first European contact" Clearly, North America was not including Central America.

Mexico is North America.

And also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript

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

#199
post #91

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.

Unsurprisingly this one generated a lot of responses.

My working hypothesis for this question involves colonization, technologically driven scales of time and space, and selection. The essence is totally obvious: either you develop sustainable practices or you go extinct.

Consider a group of people colonizing an area previously uninhabited by humans. When they arrive, they will disrupt the local ecosystem to some extent.

In some cases, the new combined system of ecosystem structure and human culture will settle into an attractor that can support humans for a long time (relative to frequency of colonization). In other cases, it will not, and the human population will die out. (Externally driven parameter changes can also turn a sustainable system into an unsustainable one.)

With a low enough colonization rate, most active communities will be operating sustainably.

Over time, technology increases the rate of spread of humanity. Cultures with more advanced technology increasingly spread into existing settlements as well as taking over existing land.

But the basic process continues: some systems last; some do not. The ones that last longer are the ones with sustainable practices.

This process is now operating at a global scale. Either we get sustainable, or things get bad.

Some people have concluded that the easier path is to colonize other planets.

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Mali? Great Zimbabwe?

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