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

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

#101

Post by suddenlybananas »

culi wrote: post #64
shimman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber. It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact som…

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.

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

#102

Post by suddenlybananas »

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 aren't any more or less of the ecology than anyone else, unless you believe in blood and soil. Humans are part of the ecology, being indigenous has nothing to do with it.

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

#103

Post by suddenlybananas »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #72
pibaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of why Europeans think the americas were pristine and barely touched by human existence is because smallpox was ahead of European explorers and by the time Europeans set foot on many places on the continent, they saw ecosystems that had recovered from human intervention after the local population had collapsed.

Europeans often failed to recognize Indigenous land management because it did not resemble European cities or farms

There's accounts of Europeans encountering cities in the Amazon, people didn't take them seriously since they disappeared in the intervening time.

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

#104

Post by uwagar »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #57
uwagar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine. the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.

> and clearing for beef production I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest. You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.

i prefer you fix your bugs instead.

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

#105

Post by curioadu »

culi wrote: post #64
shimman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber. It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact som…

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…

While many Amerindians had impressive achievements considering their almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, your claim seems misleading.

> At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a]

> During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants.

And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia.

> Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it.

> In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60]

> With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished.

> Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14]

> Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]

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

#106

Post by curioadu »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #102
tkel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aren't any more or less of the ecology than anyone else, unless you believe in blood and soil. Humans are part of the ecology, being indigenous has nothing to do with it.

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 were greatly decreased in numbers and area; and done it for so many years and generations that the ecology changed and adapted according to repeated and frequent fire-stick farming, to the point of becoming reliant on humans doing fire-stick farming.

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

#107

Post by ithkuil »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #57
uwagar wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine. the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.

> and clearing for beef production I know the real point is that you'd prefer we eat the proverbial bugs, but there's akshually more grassland in the world than forest. You don't need to cut down trees for beef production - it doesn't make any economic sense unless your logistics costs are deliberately screwed by perverse government incentives.

So some countries have more forest than grassland?

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

#108

Post by ywvcbk »

culi wrote: post #58
pibaker wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of why Europeans think the americas were pristine and barely touched by human existence is because smallpox was ahead of European explorers and by the time Europeans set foot on many places on the continent, they saw ecosystems that had recovered from human intervention after the local population had collapsed.

I've heard that explanation as well. But I don't know if "recovered from human intervention" is a fair characterization since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases. Estimates range from 5 to 10 million people in the Amazonian Basin by the time Colombus reached the Americas (though some go as high as 20 million). I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human interven…

Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.

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

#109

Post by gabriel666smith »

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.

Whilst being aware that the civilization in question ended significantly before European arrival in South America, I have two questions that hopefully someone smart here can help with:

1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between locales. We know that part is true from many sources, but:

A) Can we roughly model the spread of smallpox by looking for (for example) populated areas mentioned in one European source that are unmentioned, or mentioned as empty, by another source that would have likely crossed paths with that civ?

B) Can this tell us anything about trade routes and volume? Can we make any inferences about pop density, even very weak inferences, which might help us know where to look for stronger evidence? It does seem like each European discovery historically revises the estimated population(s) upwards.

2. LiDAR is awesome. Maybe not in the Amazon - in less foliage-dense places - is it being combined with, for example, an EMF (or some other kind of more granular lightweight detection system) - strapped to a drone?

It feels like once we see something interesting on LiDAR, sending a swarm of lightweight drones with some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside is quite a quick way to get interesting information. I don’t know a lot about radio waves, so I don’t know if there’s a suitably lightweight detector for this purpose.

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

#110

Post by defrost »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #109
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.

Whilst being aware that the civilization in question ended significantly before European arrival in South America, I have two questions that hopefully someone smart here can help with: 1. The spread of disease (smallpox specifically) being fast enough that most European sources describe a relatively uninhabited Amazon strikes me as potentially interesting. This means that contact and trade was happening between local…

> some kind of metal detector sellotaped to the underside

Been a thing since the 1970s, physics dictates dimensions though - you can go wrap or dangle:

* https://csegrecorder.com/articles/view/the-megatem-fixed-win...

* https://cseg.ca/airborne-electromagnetic-systems-state-of-th...

* https://www.ga.gov.au/scientific-topics/disciplines/geophysi...

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