COUNTRY NOTES: Downtown in The Lost Cities of the Amazon

— By Nicholas Asheshov —

Some weeks ago two events, one of them startling, came together to pin-point the mysterious new conundrum of the Amazon.

The first was the appearance on a busy riverbank in the Madre de Dios of a few dozen members of a previously-isolated group of Indians.  They killed someone who had been trying to help them.

The naked Indians, seen on TV screens around the world, were described by anthropologists as descendants of an unbroken line of hunting and gathering savages, living fossils of our neolithic past.

This is, according to new Amazon thinking, incorrect. These Indians are the sad, socially degenerated remnants of nations and tribes that were productive, sophisticated and stable  just a few centuries ago.

The other event was an article in The New York Times that reported on the discovery in Acre, only a few hours travel from the Madre de Dios Indians, of extensive, deep straight, or sometimes circular, trenches, ridges and mounds dating back to pre-Columbian times, indicating a large, well-developed society.

This was just the latest evidence that the Amazon, or at least parts of it, was heavily populated by well-organized societies in much the same way as the high Andes were remodelled by the Tiahuanuco, the Chavin, the Chachapoyas, the Huari, and the Incas.

Over the past couple of decades the pre-history of the Americas has been revolutionized, setting off poison-tipped academic and ecological vendettas.

First of all, the Americas were populated much earlier, at least 33-35,000 years ago, double the time previously calculated.  That is back to Neanderthal epochs.

Second, there were many more people here when Columbus arrived than was earlier thought.  And, most important, the societies and nations of the Americas were much more sophisticated and structured than was previously understood.  They were agriculturalists, not the war-whoopers of the movies.  Their mode of life and agriculture had massive, long-term effects on the original pre-human forests.   Fire was a basic control mechanism.

Today the evidence of genetics, linguistics and archaeology is clear that the Amazon was not just an impenetrable green hell populated by primitive hunters and fishermen eking out an unchanging, culturally marginal existence.

The same applies to North America.  Here most of the descriptions of primitive Indians come from 18th and 19th century travelers who were seeing only the sorry leftovers of great nations that had been obliterated by smallpox, viral hepatitis, influenza and other European and African diseases.  The Conquest set off the Dark Ages in the Americas.

In the Amazon the same collapse, featuring malaria and yellow fever, was exacerbated by the rubber boom of the late-1800s and early-1900s.

You can check this out in three fine recent books.  Two of these are Charles C Mann’s easy-to-read, well-researched “1491” and a sequel, “1493“, just out; and in John Hemming’s “Tree of Rivers“, a masterly description of the Amazon.  Hemming, author of the classic “The Conquest of the Incas” has also written, earlier, three volumes on the peoples of the Amazon.

Charles Mann describes, for instance, how my old friend William Denevan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin, discovered how the Beni, on the edge of the western Amazon in Bolivia, was a flourishing, well-organized center of islands and causeways on what is today a bleak, sparsely-inhabited combination of dense jungle and flood-plain, inhabited today by sad remnants of Siriono Indians.

Bill worked on the Peruvian Times just before me in the 1960s and his stories on the Beni and similar mounds and trenches around Lake Titicaca in the PT were the first indication of this revolution in South American prehistory.

“Beginning as much as three thousand years ago, this long-ago society,”  Mann writes, “created one of the largest, strangest, and most ecologically rich artificial environments on the planet.”

Great stuff.

Mann desribes the Amazon as one of the world’s half-dozen agricultural heartlands, where plants were domesticated, the epicenters of civilization.  Others were the tropical Andes, Central America, the Fertile Crescent, and China.

The Amazon, including the area where the savage Indians appeared the other day, just north and west of the Beni, was the source of yuca, known elsewhere as manioc or cassava, as well as tobacco, peanuts chili pepper, chocolate, Brazilian broad beans, the peach palm, and Brazil nuts.

It was also the homeland of Hevea Brasiliensis, the rubber tree, which was to be, along with steel and oil, one of the three creators of the 20th century version of civilization.

For the Amazon, including the Indians on the banks the other day of the Madre de Dios, rubber became a disaster, just as gold and silver had been for Peru and Mexico.  The malaria and yellow fever, imports from Africa, that it helped to spread turned the Amazon and its western tributaries into what Charles Mann calls “de-populated fever valleys.”  Slavery did the rest.

The Amazon as a center of civilization has become the subject of a bitter dispute between two magnificent lady academics, the archaeologists Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution and Anna Roosevelt of the University of Illinois. 

Hemming mentions the two warring camps on the issue of whether or not there were tribes with sophisticated, stable, large populations: Dr Meggers says that the Amazon basically had only hunters+gatherers; Dr. Roosevelt says that there were big lively societies all over the place.

Here is a message to me the other day from John Hemming and you will find nowhere else a more precise and appropriately colorful description of the state of play today in Amazon studies.

“Broadly, I think that Anna (and her acolytes like Michael Heckenberger) are right to say that there were large chiefdoms on some riverbanks of the main Amazon and its tributaries (although there were also very long stretches of uninhabited river).  Those chiefdoms were based on the river and its fish and turtle resources. 

“But I think that the Roosevelt school exaggerates the size and sophistication of their beloved chiefdoms, which they compare to the great civilizations of Peru.

“They also exaggerate the extent of human manipulation of forests. Remember that it was very laborious indeed for early man to fell trees (other than palms) with their stone axes.  And they had no need or desire to do so: they were very happy in pristine forests full of game. Planting the trees they liked near their villages was merely rearranging the deckchairs.  It did not alter the Amazon landscape.

“Meggers is right about the inability of Amazon terra-firma forest to support villages of more than a thousand people maximum – the surrounding game is exhausted otherwise, and the soils under mature forests are too weak to sustain large-scale farming. So, away from the rivers, early tribes were not much larger than their modern descendants at the time of first contact and before being hit by imported disease.”

For many years, John was Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, London, and we can all understand what he means by “rearranging the deckchairs.”

But not everyone agrees. Charles Mann in his just-published “1493,” calls the Amazon “the world’s richest garden,” quoting archeobiologists and looking at parts of the Amazon today that are carefully-distributed and well-tended collections of trees, plants and fish and game reserves.

Today there are tourists but it can still be a tough place.  Near the Acre ruins noted in The New York Times, settlers are still gunned down by big-money ranchers.  I remember John telling me of the day in 1961 when he carried the arrow-filled body of his friend Richard Mason back to camp.   A decade later, in 1970, I myself was searching the jungles of the Pantiacolla in the Upper Madre de Dios for my friend Robert Nichols, chief reporter of the Peruvian Times of which I was then the editor, who had set out to find Paititi, a version of El Dorado.   It transpired that he, and two French companions, had been stoned to death by the Machiguengas.

Unlike John, I am not prejudiced by knowing what I am talking about and I unreservedly plump for the Roosevelt school’s bumptious Amazonian super-civilizations and I am supported by no less than Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.  Their latest movie, due out this year, is The Lost City of Z, where Brad plays Colonel Percy Fawcett, the English explorer, searching in 1925 for El Dorado in the Amazon.   Let’s hope that Brad has better luck than Percy, who never returned. 

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Notes.
Colonel Percy Fawcett said: “The answer to the enigma of Ancient South America – and perhaps that of the entire prehistoric world – will be found when the old South American cities are located and opened up to scientific research. These cities exist, and I will prove that they exist.”
————-
Tony Morrison, the wildlife photographer and author, on a recent trip to the Beni:
“Setting out from Trinidad in the Beni we hopped on a 35b bus in the plaza and headed to the great mound at Eviata where the entire village is built above the floodplain. I went there to see the last of the Siriono tribe, as they have a base around the old mission church. What a bedraggled lot they were and the mound is now topped by a huge ENTEL satellite dish — not a bad place to site it as it should be above the annual flood.”
——
Vera Tulyneva charlie.quispe@yahoo.com . Ms Tulyneva is completing a thesis on “Paititi” at the Universidad Catolica, Lima.  Commenting on The New York Times story on ancient remains in the Acre:

“The earth constructions of Acre have been in the news for the past five years. The first one to speak of them was Martti Pärssinen, an historian from Finland who had been working in the region for many years. In fact, they are not “geoglyphs,” i.e. earth figurative drawings of apparent religious/ritual function, but rather utilitarian earthworks, like drainage trenches. Acre, Mojos, Beni, Xingu and many other Amazonic regions are full of them.”
————–
Michael Heckenberger website on Xingu: The Xingu Ethnoarchaeological Project
————–
An article on Acre: Pre-columbian geometric earthworks
and  Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purus  

————–
The New York Times: The Nazca Lines of the Acre jungle – Land Carvings Attest to Lost World
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 This article was published in Caretas magazine this week in Spanish. 

Nick Asheshov is a Director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba. A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian times from 1969 to 1990.

Heavy Rains Strand Tourists En Route To Machu Picchu

Approximately 200 tourists who were heading to Peru’s ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu were stranded due to heavy rains, newspaper El Comercio reported Tuesday.

The tourists were stuck in the Colcamayo zone, in the district of Santa Teresa, on an alternative road to Machu Picchu, the daily said.

Some of the tourists, including approximately 80 Chileans, decided to continue on Read more…

Recovering Antiquities: Golden Moche Bead Returned to Peru

A solid gold ornament in the shape of a monkey head, dating from the 100-800 AD Moche culture of Peru’s north coast, was returned to Peru yesterday by the New Mexico History Museum, at a ceremony in Washington D.C.

The gold bead, measuring 4.5cm tall by 7cm wide and most probably once on a necklace, was part of an exhibition on Art of Ancient America in the Palace of Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The collection was on loan to the museum since 1998 by private collector John Read more…

CADE Innovations: Stay tuned for ‘El Nuevo Peru de Antes!’

By Nicholas Asheshov

~ Special to Peruvian Times ~

As business leaders meet in Cusco this weekend to focus on “Innovation” at the Annual Executive Conference, CADE, from the countryside of the Urubamba valley the author proposes looking back for truly radical and practical, high-tech innovation.

Ancient Peru was one of the half-dozen centers of the technological and political innovation that ushered in today’s complex world of great, interdependent cultures.

Unlike the other centers — China, the Fertile Crescent and Egypt, India, and finally the Mediterranean and Western Europe — most of Peru’s innovations, above all in social organization, were lost in the disaster of the Conquest.

Proud, sad bits and pieces of the ancient Andean and coastal cultures remain.  The potato and a half-dozen varieties of maize have been essential parts of the food chain that is feeding 7,000 million people.  China is today the world’s biggest producer of the potato, first domesticated around Lake Titicaca, and of the sweet potato, camote.

Peruvians can reflect, perhaps with mixed feelings, that it was the US$200,000,000,000, at today’s values —the figure comes from Prof. Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: The West and The Rest, published in London earlier this year— that the conquistadors sent back to Europe between 1532 and 1780, which provided the liquidity for the creation of the global economy of the 21st century.

But the precious metals, like the guano, tomato, quinoa, cherimoya and cocaine, are secondary and are in any case not really what we mean by innovation.  The khipu, the cutting-edge strings-and-knots combination of iPad and Registros Publicos — production cost 35 cents— was lost, destroyed maliciously by the priests, the Taliban of the day.  Only 620 remain. According to Prof. Gary Urton, of Harvard, it was much more sophisticated than anything in Europe at the time but they still haven’t cracked its complex code.

Like Machu Picchu, the thousands of miles of all-weather roads, irrigation systems on the coast, tens of thousands of stone terraces and water systems in the valleys and highlands, and the networks of warehouses, these were by-products of the real value of life in Ancient Peru.  This was the lively, aggressive social and political stability that allowed the Incas and a dozen great cultures that preceded them — Chavin, Moche, Tiahuanacu, Huari — to produce societies that were in the front rank of their contemporaries worldwide.

On Lake Titicaca, in the Sacred Valley, and in 50 other valleys like the Colca and the Rimac, the stability and genius for working together of the ancient Peruvians literally remodeled one of the world’s toughest environments.  They consistently created an idealized, civilized world of good order and stability.

No one can look at the massive millimeter-fine, delicately imaginative granite blocks at Sacsayhuaman, Pisac, Rac’chi, Huanuco Viejo, Rosaspata, Sillustani and, naturally, Machu Picchu itself without understanding instantly that for two or three thousand years ancient Peruvians created a purposeful permanence.

The same applies, with obvious local variations, to the great adobe pyramids on the coast.  Perhaps in the same way that today’s costeños are more outgoing than the peoples of the highlands, the costeños produced the flamboyant artistry of the gold- and silver-working of Sipan.

These were productive, often competitive societies whose vision was not just day-to-day or year-to-year, but in some clear way, eternal.  You and your children do not spend a lifetime producing a granite masterpiece just to fill in the time between meals.

Peruvian schoolchildren are not taught about the power and range of their ancestors.

The Incas — schoolchildren in Urubamba, Huancane, Bambamarca and Ayabaca are taught today — were ‘indigenas’.   There is a puzzling political agenda here.  The teachers do not know, do not seem to want to know, about Peru’s long distinguished past.

So my proposal for a first innovation that Peru today might want to consider is to produce DVD and computer programs that will be in every school in the land, every classroom in the country, which will tell the real story of the pre-Conquista past.  They will learn, for instance, of the complex, innovative technology that went into the layered construction of the terraces and hydrological systems they see around them.  They will learn about the networks of warehouses and storage facilities.  When the Spaniards arrived, they found that there was two or three years of food and clothing stored everywhere.

The project includes the creation of computer games called “Build An Andean Empire” and “Run Your Own Coastal Civilization” and, of course, war games like “Incas vs Spaniards.”

Secondary-level kids will move on to “How to Run a Municipality/Region/Country.”

And so on.

The interactive computer programs and movies, modeled perhaps on the science and history programs produced for the NGS, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel and the BBC, will be financed and distributed by the banks and commercial and industrial companies, all of them members of CADE, which will also be in charge of distributing them.  Teachers, including members of SUTEP, will be instructed on teaching the children how to switch them on and off.

Within a few years young Peruvian voters will have a new vision of their country and its possibilities.  Unlike most other countries, including some of the neighbors, they have a history, not to mention a geography, which they can see and touch, second to none.

Population: from 1mn to 3mn to 30mn — and now on to 40mn

It is hard to blame today’s governments for not telling the young about the first-class public administrations of Peru half a millennium ago.

The most crushing blow of the Conquest was in the loss of people.  Between smallpox and piratical savagery, nine out of every 10 Peruvians died between 1530 and 1601 when a census registered only one million people, most of them in the highlands.  The coastal peoples had been exterminated.

These population losses were calculated by Noble David Cook in Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru 1520-1620 and Born to Die; Disease and New World Conquest published by the Cambridge University Press.

Peru’s population was to rise painfully slowly to three million by 1911.  All the Peruvians of a century ago would all fit easily into Lima’s Cono Norte today.   As everyone knows, today Peru’s population is 30mn, 10 times greater, in less than four generations.

Inca Peru had 10 million inhabitants, according to Prof. Cook’s best guess.   All of them lived out in what is today the countryside.  Cuzco had perhaps 40,000 inhabitants, less than Huacho today.

The next innovation will be to prepare for a Peru that within another generation will have 40 million people.  Peruvians will be much younger in a decade or two than the Chinese and other Asian tigers and, of course, the already-geriatric Europeans.

The local politicians in Cajamarca, Puno and elsewhere today who are protesting against gold and copper mines are being unusually far-sighted.   They are trying to keep the gold, silver and copper out of the hands both of international bankers and of Lima bureaucrats.  “Water for us, not gold for them,” they shout, and of course we all agree.   The government should instead borrow from the bankers and, noblesse oblige, repay them in worthless paper in 2041 et seq.

A decade or two from now the minerals will be worth ten times their present value and a generation of history-savvy, computer-literate Peruvians will be able to take full advantage of their elders’ foresight.

______________________

This article was published in Caretas magazine this week in Spanish.

Nick Asheshov is a director of The Machu Picchu Train Co., Urubamba. A veteran journalist, noted explorer and entrepreneur, he was editor of the Peruvian Times from 1969 to 1990.

One Million Tourists Visit Machu Picchu in 2011

The ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, uncovered from overgrowth and obscurity 100 years ago by U.S. explorer Hiram Bingham, will have received at least one million tourists by the end of this year, according to Percy Canales, president of the National Chamber of Tourism, Canatur.

The number of visitors represents a 30 percent hike over last year — when 660,000 people visited the site— and is undoubtedly due in part to the mass Read more…

Rolling Stones Front Man Mick Jagger Arrives at Machu Picchu

British rock star Mick Jagger arrived at the ancient Inca citadel of Machu Picchu on Thursday, as part of a trip to Peru that has included a sit-down with President Ollanta Humala and a visit to an eco-lodge in the jungle region of Madre de Dios.

The front man for the Rolling Stones, Jagger travelled to Machu Picchu by train from Cusco and was expected to climb Huayna Picchu, the picturesque peak that overlooks the ruins, on Friday, state news agency Andina reported.

Machu Picchu is Peru’s biggest tourism attraction, drawing in hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the globe each year.

Jagger arrived in Cusco Wednesday on a private jet, along with his family, from Read more…

HISTORY OF PERU SERIES – Part 10: The Big Picture —3500 BC – 500 AD

By Paul Goulder – Special to Peruvian Times —

During the past year the Peruvian Times (see links below) has published a series of articles on the History of Peru spanning the years, very approximately, 3500 BC to 500 AD. At the beginning of this period humans were starting to live in towns, to build monumental religious sites, to specialize in trade and to form hierarchical societies. 

Towards the end of the period political states had formed to the extent that two of them, Read more…

Cusco’s Casa Concha opens doors for Machu Picchu exhibition

Cusco’s Casa Concha, owned by the Universidad Nacional San Antonio Abad de Cusco (UNSAAC), has opened its doors for two weeks to exhibit more than 360 artifacts from Machu Picchu that were recently returned by Yale University.

The artifacts will be displayed in two rooms in the Casa Concha, located about half a block from Cusco’s main plaza, state news agency Andina reported.

The opening was inaugurated by UNSAAC’s rector, Victor Raul Aguilar. In the first two hours of the opening, which is free for locals and tourists, the exhibition attracted about 100 visitors. Read more…

Peru Gov’t looks to increase visitor limit to Machu Picchu

Peru’s Ministry of Tourism and Foreign Trade said Tuesday that a recent study supports more than doubling the number of visitors to Machu Picchu, the ancient Inca citadel perched on a mountain top in Cusco region.

Currently, the daily limit on tourists that can enter the Machu Picchu site is set at 2,200. According to state news agency Andina, the ministry’s study suggests the citadel can withstand 5,479 visitors a day. This would allow Machu Picchu, a World Heritage Site, to receive approximately 2 million tourists a year.

The study is in direct contrast to the opinion of UNESCO, which has criticized proposals in the past to raise the limit on the number of visitors, arguing that it would be unsustainable Read more…

Machu Picchu centennial celebrations begin

Peru began celebrations  Thursday for the 100th anniversary of the “discovery” of the Inca citadel Machu Picchu with musical shows and light displays at the site for some 200 guests, including President Alan Garcia.

During the day, dances were performed in the streets of Cuzco, the starting-off point for the thousands of tourists that visit Machu Picchu every year. The dances included waca waca, danzaq, paucartampus, qhapac negro, among others, daily La Republica reported.

Cuzco’s regional government also organized painting and photography exhibitions in the San Francisco and Espinar plazas. Read more…

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