The Amazonian Culture

Ancient Rituals

Native Amazonians have lived here for over 20,000 years. Though there are many different tribes have spread along the Amazon, they all have developed their own ways of life in harmony with nature. They believe in sharing the hunt and the food they gather. Most of them believe that they are reborn through their grandchildren, though rules for marriage vary so much. They also traditionally live in communal or family houses made from materials such as tree bark and palm leave fronds. Dressing up in various ceremonial costumes, they have various festivals and ceremonies during the year to celebrate harvests for their gods or deity. Sharing is key to survival, as the Amazon does not tolerate misers. Warfare was never for territory, but merely to right wrongs done or imagined and as exercises in combat.

 

Existence of an advanced ancient rainforest culture

An ancient astrological observatory discovered in Brazil leads to the theory that the Amazon rainforest was once home to advanced cultures and large sedentary populations of people. Besides the well-known empires of the Inca and their predecessors, millions of people once lived in the forests and shaped the environment to suit their own needs.

The pre-colonial observatory was built of 127 blocks of granite each three meters (10 feet) high, arranged upright and evenly spaced in circles in an open field. The archaeologists do not know yet when the structure was built, but ceramic fragments found nearby suggest that it is between between 500 and 2,000 years old.

Researchers are comparing the discovery to Stonehenge, a mysterious stone circle in southern England that was built between 3000 and 1600 BC. The finding suggests that ancient Amazonians has knowledge of astronomy and lends support to the idea that the once Amazon

The Virgin Forest

The Amazon has a long history of human settlement. Contrary to popular belief, sizeable and sedentary societies of great complexity existed in the rainforests of this region. These societies produced pottery, cleared sections of rainforest for agriculture and managed forests to optimize the distribution of useful species. The notion of a virgin Amazon is largely the result of the population crash following the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. Studies suggest that at least 10-12% of the Amazon's terra firme forests are "anthropogenic in nature" resulting from the careful management of biodiversity by indigenous people. However, unlike most current cultivation techniques, these Amazonians were attuned to the ecological realities of their environment from five millennia of experimentation and accumulation of knowledge, with a strong understanding of how to manage the rainforest to meet their requirements within a sustainable capacity. They saw the importance of maintaining biodiversity through a careful balance of natural forest, open fields and sections of forest managed so as to be dominated by species of special interest and greatest use to humans. 

Deeper in the Amazon there is further evidence of widespread human settlement.

The discovery of a network of villages and towns connected by precisely engineered roads -- some up to 45 meters (150 feet) wide -- shocked many Amazon researchers when the study was published in 2003. The 10-year study, which covered 1000 square kilometers in the upper Rio Xingu region, found a cluster of nineteen villages that likely supported between 2,500 and 5,000 people.

Complex of communities could be just one of many complexes in the Amazon region. These societies were long overlooked by archeologists because they did not build the large cities and rock structures seen among the Mayans, Aztecs and Incas. Since stone is not widely available in the Amazon, settlements were constructed of wood, clay, bone and other materials that deteriorate rapidly in the warm, humid climate of the rainforest. Thus, once abandoned, buildings and roads constructed by Amazon dwellers quickly disappeared back into the jungle.

In an environment like the Amazon, without the benefits of iron tools or domesticated animals, clearing and sowing agricultural fields was a difficult and time-consuming process. Instead, Indians planted trees, yielding twenty years of productivity from their labor, as opposed to two or three years with a standard low-growing crop.

Creating orchards, instead of field, early inhabitants of Amazonian regions served themselves with great economy. Planting trees in the fertile river basin, Indians capitalized on the benefit of rich soil quality and the deep reaching roots of trees helped agriculture to survive during the dry season and in periods of drought. Experts now estimate that a significant portion of lowland forests, perhaps as much as 15 percent, were organized to benefit humans. The concept of a "built environment" contrasts sharply with the idealist and traditional version of an all-natural, virgin territory.

Black earth

The best explanation for this kind of botanical record is the past creation and use of terra preta do indio, meaning "Indian black earth" in Portuguese. This unique, mineral-rich soil was purposely created by pre-Columbian people through a process of adding charcoal and animal bones to regular soil to create a highly fertile hybrid, ideal for agriculture. Beyond the Amazon's notorious reputation for thin and poor-quality soil, terra preta provided unprecedented life and bounty for its inhabitants.

Charcoal is the essential ingredient of terra preta, which gives the soil a more substantial quality as organic matter latches on to the compounds within it through oxidation, retaining moisture and nutrients. Despite these benefits, charcoal lacks substantial nutrients on its own, so Indians enriched the soil with organic waste like the bones of turtles, fish and birds. Higher quantities of calcium, nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur exist more in terra preta than is found in typical earth. If managed well, this matter can avoid exhaustion from agricultural stress far longer than regular soil. Soil ecologists believe they may be able to replicate terra preta to convert thin tropical soil into rich, substantial, sustaining and possibly self-replicating earth.

Scientists believe terra preta was created through a process one specialist calls the "slash-and-char" method. Essentially, instead of completely burning trees to ash, pre-Colombian farmers merely smoldered organic matter to form charcoal, and then stirred the charcoal into the soil. The added benefit of this method was that far less carbon was released into the air than now common slash-and-burn method. Carbon emissions, or rather an imbalance of carbon emissions, have a well-recognized negative effect on forests, so this ancient method was truly efficient and environmentally sensitive. Charcoal is capable of retaining its carbon in the soil for close to fifty thousand years. 

Plague

Many of these populations flourished along rivers where means of transportation, excellent fishing, and fertile floodplain soils for agriculture were available in abundance. These locations were ideal for settlements, however, when the Europeans arrived, these were the first to be affected, and subsequently decimated, since the explorers used the major rivers as highways to

the interior. Within the first one hundred years of European contact, the Amerindian population was reduced by at least 90 percent. The majority of the surviving peoples lived in the remote interiors of the Amazonian region, forced there by the encroaching Europeans, or those few already traditionally living there in smaller groups.

The premier cause of the massive reduction in population was disease. Smallpox was the first introduced malady to ravage the indigenous peoples. Subsequent epidemics of typhus, influenza and smallpox again in the 1500 and 1600s essentially erased all traces of living Incan culture. Dobyns, the first social scientist to trace the origins of the New World inhabitants' demise, estimated that prior to European contact, the Western Hemisphere supported between 90 and 112 million people. To put this already large figure into clearer perspective, Dobyns' estimate for the Americas' population in the late 1400’s surpassed that of Europes’ for the same period. 

The reason behind Indians' intense susceptibility to the diseases of the Old World lay in their isolation. Having never previously been exposed to certain biological agents, native inhabitants were utterly defenseless to the epidemics. Their ignorance about the diseases only aided the spread of these foreign ailments, as inhabitants remained with the sick for support instead of using the practiced European methods of quarantines and isolation.