The Ancient Amazon

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2,000 years ago, at the same time that great cities like Rome, Athens and Alexandria were at their height in the Mediterranean, thousands of miles to the west across the Atlantic Ocean, equally large and thriving cities were being constructed in the ancient Amazon, epicentres of extraordinary little-known civilisations who moulded the world's largest rainforest to thrive in their millions. Today we often see the Amazon basin as an endless expanse of trees and rainforest, but this massive area of South America, spanning eight countries, was home to a huge range of landscapes, biodiversity and ancient civilizations.
The ancient Amazon is a story of agriculture and farming stretching back 8,000 years, of fish-fuelled civilizations along the coast, of cities and highways, of beautiful ceramics and art, and maybe even of an Amazonian Pompeii situated beneath a still smouldering volcano. It's the Ancients on History Hit.
I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's episode, we're exploring the extraordinary ancient civilizations that lived all across the ancient Amazon basin in South America. This area of the world is one of the most exciting for archaeologists right now, because new technological advancements are starting to uncover a whole range of ancient sites beneath the trees.
Sites that belong to prosperous, well-organized, urbanized societies spread out across a densely populated and richly diverse landscape. To talk through this story, I was delighted to interview the journalist, writer and author Lawrence Blair, who has just written a new book that explores these vanished civilizations of the ancient Amazon and more.
Lawrence, he dialed in from South America for this interview, so we were incredibly grateful for his time. Now sit back and enjoy as we cover the story of the ancient Amazon.
Lawrence, it is great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me, Tristan.
Really pleased to be here. I mean, the Amazon and the ancient Amazon, I must admit, when Sal mentions the Amazon today, it still feels, at least to me, quite like a frontier area, Lawrence, with uncontacted peoples and so on.
Absolutely. But looking at what you've written and research, this needs to be an area full of amazing different ancient civilizations that were there thousands of years ago.
Oh, definitely. You know, I think we all have this idea, don't we,

of the Amazonist? Yeah, this pristine wilderness, this kind of backwater, and it's so far away from anything and everything. But actually, you know, what's so fascinating is, you know, in the past

few decades alone, that idea is really being turned on its head. And actually, you know,

we're discovering more and more archaeologists from Brazil around and around the world and

various South American countries are finding that this is really a centre of world history. And

Thank you. head.
And actually, we're discovering more and more archaeologists from Brazil around the world and various South American countries are finding that this is really a centre of world history and should be considered as being up there with the Mexica or the Aztecs, with the Maya, even the Incas and any of the great ancient civilisations of the world. So I'm really thrilled to have a chance to talk to you about some of them today.
It's nice that you mentioned names straight away, like you said, Aztec, Maya, Inca, those kind of Mesoamerican civilisations we sometimes think of. And then to put these peoples who lived in the Amazon, sometimes contemporarily, with those civilisations, we can really delve into that link as well.
But no such thing as a silly question to kick it all off. I'm sure we've all got a rough idea about where the Amazon is, but I feel if we delve into the details, it's a bit more complex.
Lawrence, what and where is the Amazon? That's a great question. So the Amazon is a huge area.
It's the size of Western Europe. It spans eight countries here in South America.
We're talking about a dozen major rivers that are crisscrossing it. Of course, the Amazon River is the most famous one.
It's 4,000 miles long. And it's the largest tropical forest on the planet.
And of course, it's crucial to the Earth's climate as well. And I think one thing to make clear here is, it's not just this kind of endless expanse of trees, of jungle, to put it that way.
We're talking about a huge range of landscapes. You've got these kind of tabletop mountains in Venezuela, Colombia, Guyana, a cloud forest on the eastern slopes of the Andes, big cities in Manaus and Belém.
They're about 30 million people or so who live in the Amazon today. And of course, also we have this kind of marshy swampland near the mouth of the river and these kind of floodplains in northern Bolivia.
So it's really, you know, it's a kind of mosaic of different landscapes. And of course, it would have looked very different, you know, 500, 1,000, 10,000 years ago, perhaps a bit drier, perhaps more savannah dispersed with the forest.
And I think, you know, one key concept to think about is this idea of this pristine rainforest today that we're looking at and still exists in some places is actually a bit more like a very carefully tended garden that's grown wild. And what do you mean by a savannah there? Because I think of Africa.
Do we mean like tall grasses and big plains as well? Exactly. We're talking about flood plains which don't have forests, but during the season where the river is lower, grasses grow.
We're talking about patches of forest patches of of grassland you know interspersed with forest it's really a mixture and the amazon connects with ecosystems on on all different sides as well um so uh really a diverse and very biodiverse landscape you know it holds millions and millions of species many of which we probably haven't even discovered. And it feels like highlighting that biodiversity, that variance in geographical landscapes across the Amazon, and you mentioned it looked quite a bit different in ancient prehistoric times, but it's still that great diversity of biomes almost.
That must be really important to highlight straight away, I guess, when we cover the different peoples that existed here. It's not everyone living very similarly.
I'm guessing an ancient people living, let's say, in the mountains at the tabletops would have had a very different life to those on an ancient savannah of the Amazon. Absolutely.
We're talking about a huge cultural diversity, you know, hundreds of different groups, thousands even with hundreds of different languages, you languages, whose ways of life probably change over the millennia.

You have small groups of anarchistic hunter-gatherers who are quite democratic,

perhaps, in the way they run their affairs.

Then you have these seasonal farmers.

You have big urban centres, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

And some of these people, of course, are still around.

Their descendants are still here and they still have a lot to teach us. Others, of course, are no longer here and we don't even know their names.
And I think that this is the real challenge we have here. The Mexica, the Maya, even the Inca, they had some forms of writing.
The Inca had the kipu with these knotted memory cords. And of course, they interacted very closely with the Spanish.
With the ancient Amazonians, we have so little to go on. You know, it's quite fragmentary.
They left some paintings, pictograms on cliff faces. And there's a really fascinating site called the Serenilla de Chirubiquete in Colombia, which people often call the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.
Sorry, what? The Sistine Chapel of the Amazon? I know. It's this amazing spot, which is actually off limits to tourists.
But it's these huge tabletop mountains and about 20,000 or so and counting of these pictograms in red dye. And for me, the most fascinating thing is that people are still adding to them.
There are uncontacted people in the area who are still painting. And so it's almost this kind of work in progress from the kind of late Stone Age, really, to still being added to.
So that's one bit of evidence there. But also we have other things.
We have things that outsiders wrote about them. Portuguese, Spanish missionaries, gold hunters, bounty hunters.
And of course, we have to take a lot of that with a pinch of salt. We also have the archaeological record.
We have pottery, a huge amount of pottery. We have animal bones.
We have these huge glyphs, what are called geoglyphs. So the way that these people shape the landscape around them to build roads, ditches, ponds, temples, pyramids.
And I think the most intriguing thing here as well is actually more and more archaeologists or this particular class of archaeologists called the paleobotanists, they're looking at the trees themselves and plants evidence to kind of understand how actually the Amazon was being moulded over many thousands of years by human hands. And it makes sense, doesn't it, as you mentioned earlier, because of how important the Amazon is, how rich and diversity is in the plant types it has available.
That scientists with modern scientific developments and archaeologists, they are using that as a particular source of information to learn more about the landscape in ancient history. So often in the podcast, we focus on texts, on histories and on pottery, which no doubt we will look at archaeological items like pottery.
But it seems here with the Amazon, this is taking it to the next level where you also look to a huge extent at the plant material too. Oh, definitely.
I think as people who are fascinated by the past, we have a kind of bias, don't we,

towards temples and ruins.

And we want to see stone buildings.

We want to see papyrus.

And those things, of course,

are fantastic when you have them.

But I think we need to almost break out of the idea

that every ancient culture should have those things.

That actually there are ways

that you can leave a legacy

in a way that you can build a society

that really flourishes without large stone buildings and without written writing. It's almost kind of trying to flip the script a little bit and almost understand the real diversity of ancient human societies.
Before we delve into all that with that new technology and new amazing discoveries that have been in the news very recently and really want to get to, You did mention there about the writings, these later writings of Spaniards, of explorers visiting the Amazon some 500 or so years ago. I mean, that was interesting to me straight away, if that is kind of a written source.
But how is that a written source for learning about the ancient Amazon? Are they just interacting with locals and learning more about what they believe their history was? Yeah, I mean, you know, really, these first people that are going through the Amazon, they have an agenda. You know, we have this famous voyage by Francisco de Oriana, and about 60 or so men who, you know, they go to the Amazon in search of this land rich in cinnamon, which presumably the Andeans and Incas have kind of told them about.
So even there, you know, the pre-Columbian peoples of the Andes have this concept of the Amazon as being this kind of quite dangerous, exciting, wealthy place. So we have this voyage in 1541, 1542, with this group of around 60 Spaniards, Africans, Andeans, and they have this incredible eight-month voyage down the Amazon.
And, you know, they meet some people who are friendly and really take them in and give them food and show them this incredible wealth in terms of ceramics and art. But in other places, they really meet very stiff opposition.
And I think the locals can, you know, they tweak quite early on that these guys do not mean us well. And so they're fighting these running battles and they've been chased away from towns and they're starving, they're eating crabs, they're eating roots and herbs, which Gaspar de Carragal, who's the chaplain who chronicles this trip, says made us turn mad and witless.
Perhaps they were chewing on an ayahuasca plant or something there. So it's this very strange journey.
And they come across these tall warrior women, which they call the Amazons. And they talk about these great cities, which are just kind of glimmering inland.
And there's a fantastic quote by this chaplain, Garavacha, who says, all those we've passed along this river are people of much intelligence and ingenuity. They're passing these towns which are crammed cheek by jowl along the river banks.
And it's almost this fascinating glimpse of this lost world. And they weren't the only ones.
Some of your listeners may have heard of Mario Vespucci, who's the man who gives his name to the Americas and he also kind of skirts his way down the Amazon coastline in 1500 and he says you know all the ancient authors the people that you'll be familiar with your Pliny's and your Aristoteles said no no no once you go south of the equator it's just water there's nothing there or if there is a landmass there, it's completely uninhabited. It's almost a wasteland.
But Vespucci says, no, no, no, they've got it wrong. Their opinion is false, he says, and utterly opposed to the truth.
In those southern parts, I have found the continent more densely peopled than are Europe or Asia or Africa. So they're quite clear.
But for centuries, these tales of this almost urbanised Amazon are really relegated to the realm of legend. Why? Why are they relegated to the realm of legend? You'd have thought that more and more people would be fascinated from it earlier on.
Why did we then get this kind of later myth that actually this was a land without history almost? I think that's a really fascinating question. And I think part of it is because, well,

let's look at these guys who've survived this voyage.

They're not the most reliable narrators.

As I said, they spend a lot of time

tripping on these hallucinogenic herbs.

Some of them are being poisoned by tree frog toxins,

which can also cause you to have visions.

And often they don't even dare to disembark.

They say that the vessel was so full of arrows

that it looked like an orcupine. So how reliable was this testimony? And also I think locals, Amazonians, they had an incentive maybe to fob them off a bit and go, listen, if you just carry on another few miles downriver, there's this incredible city and it's dripping in Goth and it's got these powerfully built warrior queens who take men as their captives in mean, you know, what a great way to get these guys to hurry up and move on out of town.
And I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is that the diseases which Europeans bring to the new world, which indigenous peoples and nations have very little resistance to, they really inflict a terrible toll in the Amazon.
And, say, these are quite densely populated, mobile communities with these big trading networks. They send ambassadors to each other.
They send traders. They send explorers.
These are perfect vectors for typhus, malaria, for smallpox. I think by the time that Europeans come back in force about a century later in the early 1600s, there's not much evidence left of these people.
The villages are now gone and it's just kind of pure jungle. And so there's one, you know, Portuguese chronicler who says, you know, these indigenous peoples here in Brazil, they, you know, they're not like the ones in the Andes or in Mesoamerica.
They live in disorder. You know, they're godless, lawless, they're leaderless.
And I think that you mentioned the idea of Amazon being a land without history. That was famously the conclusion of this Brazilian geographer called Oclerius da Cunha, who helped map out Brazil's borders with Peru, and he said, this is a land without history.
And I think that idea really has persisted until quite recently. Archaeologists, particularly ones from the United States who came down to Brazil in the 40s and 50s, they said, well, look, the soil here in the Amazon has always been washed away by its downpours.
There's no stone. There's not enough metal for tools.
There's no big animals to hunt. So this is not really a hospitable place.
It's really hostile. And even Brazil's military dictatorship in the 70s, you know, encourages people to come and settle the Amazon.
And the slogan is a land without men for men without land. And even today you have conservationists who I think mean very well, but they will tell you when they, you know, doing their funding drives, they'll say, you know, the Amazon, in I quote, is a vast, untamed wilderness.
So the notion of Amazonia is this kind of backwater on the edge of world history, I think is pretty alive and kicking. It really is.
But let's turn to the bright, exciting part now, Lawrence. How are the tables starting to turn? What's the progress that is being made in dispelling this myth? And there's some really interesting case studies that I think we're going to focus on one by one now.
Absolutely, yeah. So this is really cutting edge stuff.
And I think it's changing every day. And it's so controversial and exciting.
But I think it's the new kind of frontier in world history and archaeology. I think one element of how this is changing is the fact we have these new technologies, these new tools.
And I think the key one of these is LIDAR,

which I think you may well have talked about in your episode on the Maya.

We probably have, but for our listeners, Lawrence,

please explain what exactly is LIDAR.

So LIDAR stands for light detection and ranging.

And basically this involves flying over a forested area in a plane

and shooting laser pulses, basically laser beams, out of the plane towards the ground. And you measure how long it takes for them to bounce back.
And these laser pulses, they can penetrate through jungle canopy. And they kind of, it's almost a bit like a bat, you know, scanning a cave with these kind of sonar squeaks.
It gives you this idea of the topography. And of course, that includes, we're talking about structures, basically, man-made structures,

ditches, roads, temples. And that's really revolutionised archaeology in many forested, many tropical areas, but I think nowhere more so in the Amazon.
And I want to talk about one particular case in particular, which is only really just revealed at the start of this year. This area is in lowland Amazonian Ecuador, an area called the Upano Valley, jungle valley, thick forest, a big snowy volcano called Sangai kind of looming over it.
And people have known for a long time that there were some structures here or some kind of mounds, you know, these maybe a dozen or so, two dozen of these kind of mounds rising up from the forest floor with pottery. But we didn't really know how many there were and kind of what connected them until recently when Ecuadorian archaeologists and international archaeologists did a massive LiDAR survey.
And what they found was just astounding. You know, we're talking about more than 6,000 of these mounds and platforms.
Some of them are 140 metres long and 40 metres. 6,000 in that one valley.
6,000 in this one valley. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.
That's just the area that they've surveyed. And these kind of, they're effectively pyramids.
They're clustered in these 15 settlements and they seem to have been the foundations of temples and houses. It looks like this is a society of upwards of 30,000, maybe even 100,000 people.
And we can see that they were carving these fields and terraces into the hillsides, very fertile soil there because of this nearby volcano. And the most exciting thing that people have pointed to here is this network of these wide, straight roads, thoroughfares even, that cut through the hillsides and seemingly go over rivers and connecting these different towns, neighbourhoods and houses.
And I think these seem to be the streets and the highways of a really organised, urbanised culture with serious resources and manpower, which is centred around two particular cities, which the researchers have dubbed Kilamope and Sangai. And I think what's also really fascinating here is they've done radiocarbon dating on some of these sites.
And it seems as though these kind of garden cities here in the Upano Valley were inhabited from roughly 500 BC through to 450 AD. So these are the various different parts of an ancient urban society that we'd usually connect with, I don't know, ancient Rome or maybe Teotihuacan further north.
And it's at the same time as those cities are in existence in ancient times. Absolutely.
Yeah, it's the classic development of an early society. It's got roads, we've got agriculture, we've got some form of urbanism.
So like you say, we're really in the same league as classical antiquity around the world. And in fact, Esteban Rostin, who's one of the leading archaeologists on this particular case, has called them, these cities, an Amazonian Rome, which I think is a great bit of branding.
But I think it's also accurate. We're dealing with this really interesting culture here.
And I think, you know, I say this is just the tip of the iceberg when we're talking about what LiDAR could reveal. There's a study last year which was the largest LiDAR survey to date and kind of looked at one huge area and then extrapolated from that.
And it said that there could be as many as 24,000 pre-Hispanic earthworks. We're talking about ponds, ditches, paths, geoglyphs, buildings, which still remain hidden under the forest.
In that one valley or a bit further out are we talking about? In the Amazon as a whole, you know. Yeah, that would have been quite something if it was all in one, the Yupinara Valley, I must admit, but I had to ask.
No, but we're really looking at these several centres, and that's not the only one.

We also have an area in northern Bolivia with these huge temples and geoglyphs and carvings

and sort of this kind of almost waterlogged irrigation system,

which almost looked like something from the Nile, from the Ganges.

So really, we're looking the killer tip of the iceberg. Our skin tells a story.
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So you can also potentially, as you highlighted there, irrigation is something which must also be you know so intertwined with these cultures you're getting a little sense i guess i said just the tip of the iceberg but to learn more about the ancient engineering how they watered their field systems and also i mean you mentioned how upano valley kind of linked is like the amazonian rome well if it's got the volcano very nearby and it's fertile lands it feels more like like an Amazonian Pompeii in one kind of way. So hopefully it doesn't have that same infamous end, but it's the tip of the iceberg.
There could be so much more discovered in the years ahead. Absolutely.
I think there, like you say, you have this kind of almost ready-made fertile soil, which is really perhaps gives them a head start. And I think it's not coincidental that a lot of, I think we'll come back to this later on, but a lot of the early domestication of crops, including even cacao, famously used in chocolate, seems to have actually not originated in the Andes or in Mesoamerica, but from that bit of Amazonian Ecuador.
So these are real pioneers. But, you know, but even elsewhere, where you don't necessarily have this fertile volcanic soil and you have a lot more rain, you have these kind of rivers which wash away a lot of the soil.
There's actually a growing consensus that Amazonians were actually engineering this kind of remarkable substance of their own, which laid the foundations for these kind of thriving, long lasting kingdoms in the rainforest. And that substance is called terra preta in Portuguese or dark earth in English to the likes of you and me.
And to kind of just give your listeners a sense of what it's like, this is a kind of deep brown, almost kind of black soil. Think about, you know, prodding a black forest gato.
It's kind of got that spongy touch to it. It's effectively ancient trash, you it's rubbish.
But even today, Brazilian farmers really treat it like treasure. And this stuff contains animal bones, it's got mollusk shells, it's got pot shards, charcoal, and full of all these kind of nutrients which agriculture needs.
Calcium, zinc, phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium. And fascinatingly, where you find it in the densest concentrations in the Amazon is along these kind of bluffs above these riverbanks, exactly the kind of places where Carvajal and Oriana saw these really densely packed settlements.
There's some disagreement about exactly what Terra Preta is and where it comes from. And the traditional view is, okay, well, this is just kind of rubbish.
It's accidental byproduct of latrines and cook fires from a millennia ago. Others have said this is river sediment, it's appearing naturally.
But actually, the growing consensus is that this stuff was actually generated on purpose. It's a way of deliberately enhancing Amazonian soil to sustain long-term habitation.
So is this a kind of Amazonian developed fertilizer or kind of special man-made soil, potentially? Exactly. Exactly.
I think that that's what we could be dealing with here. Just to give you an example of one kind of people that use this stuff, we have the Kuikuro, who are an Amazonian people.
They're still around today along the Upper Jingu River, for those who know where that is. And they settled that area about a century before 1492.
These big towns of 1,000 people, ringed by paths and wooden palisades. Today there's only around 800 of them.
But they still live in these circular thatched villages and they still pile their wastes, ash, peel from the vegetables, fish bones, broken pots, charcoal, into these big heaps known as mittens. And they leave it for a few years and then they go and spread it on their garden plots.
And they grow, you know, what they get out of them is incredible. Sweet potatoes, beans, papaya, cotton, tobacco.
And if they leave the soil alone, they don't plant anything. Jungle sprouts from it within a couple of weeks.
So it's incredibly fertile. A study just last year has analysed that terapreta, this modern terapreta created by the Kikuro with the ancient kind.
And they found that it's exactly the same in its chemical composition, or pretty much exactly the same. It's just as fertile, just as rich in organic matter.
And also it tends to occur near plazas, near squares, and near houses. And so the authors of the study who include several Ricordal researchers, they say, well, you know, this is a very strong hint that terra preta has been around for millennia and has really been used by ancient Amazonians.
It's kind of an ancient agricultural technology which locks carbon into the soil, actually, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere and potentially seems to have been producing food for many millions of people across the ancient Amazon. And that soil, we sometimes overlook this part, don't we, of course, but with farming societies, that soil is crucial to creation and then sustaining of large, large groups of people, huge groups of people in an area of the world.
So that soil is testament, do we think, must have been central to the great size, presumably, of many of these ancient peoples who lived all across the Amazon. Absolutely.
I think that this is almost their secret source. It helps them get the edge and build these kind of towns and cities.
And I think it's interesting that where you see these really, really thick deposits of terra preta is also where you see really dense deposits of ceramics and cities. And I think it's interesting that where you see these really, really thick deposits

of terra preta is also where you see really dense deposits of ceramics and pottery and signs that

people are kind of really thriving. There's one spot I went to a few years ago.
It's called

Teodonio. It's this quite small fishing village of brick bungalows on the Madeira River in the

Brazilian Amazon estate called Rondonia. And this has some of the most kind of densely packed

terra preta anywhere in the Amazon. If you think about kind of hollow ways in the English country

just in the Brazilian Amazon estate called Rondonia. And this has some of the most kind of densely packed terra preta anywhere in the Amazon.
If you think about kind of hollow ways in the English countryside, you know, we walk down these tracks and you have these big banks rising on the side of you, but, you know, it's studded with this pottery. And this actually seems to have been one of the longest continually inhabited places on the planet, and actually a crucible of not only American civilization, by which I mean America as a whole, but even world civilization.
Because here you have ancestors of two indigenous groups, family groups, I suppose, called the Arawak and the Tupi Guarani, who kind of seem to almost originate from here. They're hunting, they're fishing, they're farming, they're domesticating wild plants and vegetables, fruits, developing new languages, and they're going on the move as well.
The Arawak actually are especially intrepid navigators. We find their descendants and their people in the Chaco Forest of northern Paraguay, where I'm calling you today, the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela, Guyana, and in the Bahamas.
And actually, it's their descendants, the Taino, who come across Columbus on Hispaniola in 1492. And we actually use Arawak and Taino words every day, you know, barbecue, canoe, hammock, hurricane, maize, potato, tobacco.
These are things which have their ultimate origin in the Amazon. And just to say a quick thing about the pottery which these people are producing, it's just prodigious.
I went into this storeroom, this vault in Rondonia with two local archaeologists, and it's just packed to the rafters with crates after crates of this stuff. Cauldrons, vessels, urns for burying the dead.
It's polished, it's brightly painted. There are monkeys, there are serpents.
And I think the key thing to bear in mind, this isn't just crockery. This stuff is really crucial because it shows us that these aren't people who were scratching a living or kind of frozen in time.
These are sedentary cosmopolitan societies that have enough food and enough fuel, material, support this kind of industry of artists and artisans. I mean, Lawrence, you call it a crucible of civilisation, this particular area, and you've highlighted some of the archaeology there with that pottery.
And it's interesting that it depicts some of those animals that they would have shared their world with. How far back does that archaeology go? how far back in ancient history are we talking with people living, sedentary living, farming in that area of the world and, you know, creating all this beautiful stuff? Yeah, that boundary is being pushed back further and further every year.
But we're looking at some really dense terra preta deposits from about 6,000 years ago. And actually the oldest ceramics that have ever been found anywhere in the Americas, North or South, actually were found in the Amazon.
And they seem to date back to about 7,000 years ago. And even going even further back, we have plant materials, fossilized seeds, food waste, which goes back 9,000 years ago.
And I think this is also the other kind of secret substance, the other kind of key ingredient, which is really perhaps explains the flourishing of these Amazonian civilizations. You know, it seems as though ancient Amazonians were actually improving and, you know, adapting forests around them.
Archaeologists have identified at least 80 species. We're talking about cassava, sweet potato, Brazil nuts, peppers, fruits, palms, tobacco.
Oh, different crop types that they were cultivating. Exactly.
Okay, exactly. So taking a kind of wild variety and then experimenting with it, propagating it, planting it, until you get the best kind of yield.
I don't know if, Tristan, if you've ever tried a kind of purplish fruit called acai? I like to think I'm adventurous with these trying things, but I'm afraid I have not come across that one. Well, you have to look out for it next time you're at an ice cream shop.
But it's starting to take off, particularly in this hemisphere. It's a delicious kind of purply fruit.
It tastes a little bit like bubblegum, a little bit like raspberry. And this is a fruit which ancient Amazonians basically domesticated and propagated and made it so that it kind of flourishes in these massive big berry pods, basically.
It's this really abundant fruit full of all kinds of good stuff. And so this process of domesticating these crops, or these plants, I should say, these fruits, this was well underway by about 6,000 BC.
So it's up there in the same league as, yeah. that's a mind-blowing.
I'm sorry to interrupt once again, but this is a mind-blowing and this is a time for comparison and contrasting with us places in the world, Lawrence. 6,000 years ago, they're already testing in the Amazon these different crop types.
You know, it's, I mean, roughly in Britain, and I really stress roughly, but let's say 5,000 years ago, you've got Scarabray in Orkney and you've got the farming really taking root in places in Britain and maybe stretching like 6,000 years ago well yeah around there 3,500 BC you know at the same time or even earlier in the Amazon farming has really taken root and a rich diversity of farming as well it's a fascinating part of this discussion when you can compare the Amazon that time, really far back in time, with places like Britain and Mesopotamia as well, the Fertile Crescent. You know, two areas practicing farming, you know, at the same time, but complete other parts of the world.
Absolutely. You know, yeah, you see these maps of the world, which have little circles saying, well, here's where kind of crops originate, here's where farming starts.
And the Amazon is very rarely included. Sometimes you might see the Andes or Andes or Mesoamerica included, but I think we need to add another circle, you know, for the kind of the Western Amazon in particular.
And yeah, this is really, it's one of the kind of, you know, major centers where farming, I think farming, we can talk about that. I think it might even be better to use the word agroforestry, because this is a kind of way of planting crops, planting fruits, vegetables, which, you know, doesn't involve large amounts of deforestation.
Crucially, you know, and we're not just talking about kind of tree hugging for the sake of it, you know, what we see is that Amazonian civilizations are actually, you know, creating these trails through the forest about 25 miles into the jungle from their settlements and planting useful and propagating useful fruit trees and vegetables along those trails. And I think it's just common sense because if you haven't got, you know, access to metal tools, you're using a stone axe.
It takes you all day to cut down a tree. so you know it's much easier if you haven't got you know a metal access to metal tools you're using a stone axe it takes you all day to cut down a tree so you know it's much easier if you just okay we'll thin out the undergrowth a little bit and we'll basically plant this kind of living larder you know which kind of is going to restock itself you know it's it's simple and i think you know to give another example i think we touched on this already but you know these crops we think of as being quintessentially Andean, like maize, or quintessentially Mesoamerican, like cacao, actually seem to have originated in northwestern Amazonia.
So cacao, the Mexica and the Maya, they use its currency, they drink it as this sacred bitter drink called chocolate latul. was actually first being consumed in the Ecuadorian Amazon about 5,300 years ago, maybe by the ancestors of those Urbano Valley garden cities.
So I think the point you make there, Tristan, about a comparison with England, with the English countryside or the British countryside, I think is a good one. Because today it's this kind of jumbled landscape, it's gardens, fields, parkland, copses.
I think we now understand that it's neither entirely natural nor entirely man-made, right? And I think if you can go back a few centuries ago, our ancestors in Britain or across Western Europe were really depending on the forest. They were coppicing, they were making hedgerows, they were gathering firewood, they were hunting.
It was not so long ago that we were also in much closer contact with, we were moulded and moulded by the woods. I think to sum up this stuff on the plant domestication, the rainforest today perhaps has an estimated 400 billion trees.
The cautious estimate is that around 10% of them, 40 billion, are there because of humans.

And some would put that figure a lot higher and say that we're basically looking at a domesticated forest.

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I think you've also revealed how there's still so much to explore, as I mentioned at the beginning, about this topic and how we are today really just scratching the surface but giving a great overview and insight and more people can explore this further because there are so many stories, so many archaeological stories yet to be discovered or to be brought to the fore from the ancient Amazon, which is extraordinary. But let's move on because, as you said, we've talked about the plants, the trees, that part, that important part of the Amazon.
But there is one big feature that we haven't really covered yet, or we've just covered a bit in passing, is a transport method, which is, of course, the river Amazon. Now, Lawrence, we talked about, you know, getting food from the land and soil.
What about the fruits of the rivers, the fruits of the River Amazon? Do we know about that with these ancient civilisations in the Amazon? Absolutely, Tristan. Yeah.
I mean, if you go to the Amazon today, I mean, right now there's a really bad drought, unfortunately, which maybe we'll talk about in a bit. But they really bring us home how much people, even today, depend on the rivers of the rainforest, not just the Amazon,, the Sode Moist, the Rio Negro, you know, this is really a life that's lived on the water or in close contact with the water.
Fish is your main kind of protein source. So it's natural, of course, that people would have really depended on that centuries or millennia ago.
To set the scene for your listeners, if you take the ferry down the Rio Amazon today, you can set off from Manaus, you sling your hammock, you find a little spot to squeeze in there amongst the passengers. It takes you about five days to get down to the mouth of the Amazon at a place called Belém, which is actually where the COP conference, climate conference is going to be held next year.
And so you have this big city on the one hand, on the left, you have this place called Manachau Island, which is this kind of Switzerland sized landmass. And it's actually there which one of the rainforests, longest lasting civilizations emerged.
And again, we have the same pattern as with Ecuador, you know, Brazilian scholars noted that, okay, there was some hillocks here. This is an island which is often underwater for half the year, but it has these mounds and it has these, interestingly, these female figurines, these kind of most feminine divine images, which obviously we see in other parts of the ancient world as well.
You know, the Venus figure, you know,

which is quite familiar to a lot of early societies.

So we have these mounts here on Madashow Island.

But, you know, the idea was, well, this is kind of maybe

just a not particularly sophisticated society.

Maybe they're descendants of an Andean migration

that's come down from the Andes, come down the rivers,

and have kind of gradually shed their quote-unquote civilised ways here in their terrible tropics, because it's right on the equator, this particular spot. But again, recent surveys, recent technologies, a change in perspective maybe has helped us find evidence to suggest the opposite.
We have, in fact, hundreds of these platforms scattered across an area of

7,000 square miles. They've got clay floors, cemeteries, fireplaces, hearths that were burned

consistently for centuries. And the first signs of habitation here are dating back to 3,500 BC,

but actually these are places of really sustained feasting, worshipping morning for over a millennium after AD 300. And intriguingly, we have some skeletons from the Manishawara, these ancient people, and they actually seem to have been healthier and stronger, almost a bit like a kind of modern day Greco-Roman wrestler than even the average Brazilian today.
And actually, if you look at the pottery on the ceramics, you see this feminine divine imagery, and the graves of women are actually richer in goods. So maybe it's something a little bit like the Amazons that we talked about in Carverhaus Chronicle, you know, these warrior women.
Perhaps we're seeing an echo of that in the archaeological records in the sense that we have have Manashoa women who were actually calling the shots, and maybe even taking their pick of these kind of muscle-bound admirers. And just one thing I want to also say about these Manashoa, what's the foundation of this culture? Well, it seems like they were able to harvest all these aquatic resources, the piranhas, the turtles, the catfish, by building this really ingenious system of ponds and dams, bridges, to capture them as the flood water came in every season.
Then when it came out, it left behind this effectively a huge archipelago of fish farms. So you travel back to Manisho Island, maybe a century before Columbus, and you might see this archipelago of towns connected by bridges and walkways and populated by these industrious and relatively egalitarian fish farmers and potters.
There doesn't seem to have been this single overbearing king or priestly class, which again, I think flips the script a little bit about what we think about ancient societies, you know, the pharaoh or the king. Perhaps because of the way the environment is so rich and so bountiful, you actually, you know, you don't need to kind of kowtow to this kind of, you know, all-powerful chief, because if he gets too big for his boots, you can sort of set off into the forest for yourself and family, and start your own thing.
I'm just taking note of the Marajora culture. I've got pictures of their pottery in front of me now.
It's another one of those civilisations that I've never heard of, but now I know that we have to do a whole ancient episode just dedicated to that culture. Because they are, I mean, wow, never heard of them, but incredible archaeology that has survived, and more no doubt will be uncovered.
Fishing piranhas, I mean, that is quite something. You've got to be careful, yeah.
And, you know, and to mention those pots, yeah, we have some of them which still survive, and they're huge. You know, I was going to a museum in Belém a few years ago, and, you know, they're almost the size of two kind of outstretched arms.
You can't get your hands around them, they're're massive and they have these protuberances and these almost the kind of fish lips monkey ears it's kind of owlish expression even these kind of extended beards like the the beards you see on on on pharaoh's kind of mummies so really creative really artistic i feel there'll be more stories about that in the news absolutely over the next few months and years because i mean what it looks like is incredible but we do have to move on this this is the overview of the ancient amazon and before we completely wrap up lawrence I think you know what's coming we've covered all these amazing diverse ancient civilizations in various parts of the amazon and how long ago they were farming this area of the world this rich biodiverse area of the world what these prosperous civilizations, these prosperous urbanized societies? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And it's really one of those great mysteries because we don't have Amazonians themselves outside of oral legend telling us what happened to their distant ancestors.
I think one factor in the mix was climate change. In the millennium prior to 1492, you see in the archaeological record these big, long-range migrations by Amazonians and by other lowland peoples in South America.
It's almost as if they're fleeing something, they're running away from something, they're displaced by something. We mentioned the Upano Valley cities, that they're in the shadow of this big ominous volcano.
And you quite rightly mentioned Pompeii. Well, you know, we don't yet know, but it seems perhaps there was a big catastrophic eruption of this volcano, whose name is Sangai, which in Quechua means the frightener.
So it's almost as if it was waiting to happen. And if suddenly your fields are covered in pyroclastic flow, it's not going to have an impact on you, but also on your neighbours and your distant trading partners.
We're talking about cultures which are really in close contact with each other. And across the Amazon production of terra preta, that magical black soil that we talked about, it really falls off sharply around 80 to 1000.
know, much less of this organic soil being produced. And you start to see walls made of earth and wood springing up.
It's almost like we're seeing this breakdown in this more pacifistic, commercial archipelago of different peoples and kind of almost have people that are kind of digging digging in and fighting each other.

Around AD 1200, the Manisho mounds that we talked about on the island near Belem were

abandoned as the rain seemed to be drying up and their fish ponds probably went dry and

turned salty because you're right there on the border of the Atlantic.

As these societies grew more complex, I think a sudden shortage of a particular fish or

a plant or a commodity could really have a domino effect and trigger this rolling collapse. Right now in South America, say we're living through this really historic drought, the Amazon River is almost at its lowest level, since people can remember, since it's been recorded.
And that's causing problems even today. People can't transport their goods, people can't get to schools and hospitals.
So I think, you know, that would have had a huge impact if, you know, seasonal variations or, you know, cyclical variations in the climate had an effect. And one thing that's been revealed as these, and by recent droughts, are these carvings in the riverbank near Manaus that show these kind of ghostly faces.
A bit like Sc that famous Edward Munch painting, and also these grooves for sharpening weapons. So I think that maybe gives us a hint of what was going on.
And crucially, I think, as we mentioned already, it's these European illnesses, these plagues which sweep through these places before many Europeans even arrive. I think crucially, even before Europeans really properly invaded, let's say, South America, these illnesses were racing ahead of them before they quote-unquote conquered the Incas.
The Incas Empire had already been ravished by European illnesses because they were transmitted from one trader to another traveller to another diplomat. So really those very thriving villages which Rih and Carvajal saw in the 1540s were perhaps only the shadow of these great Amazonian powers.
And I think actually, if we think about some of the Amazonian peoples that are still uncontacted today or living in voluntary isolation is the preferred term because they're people who are choosing to avoid us and with good reason in many cases. These aren't people who have necessarily been living like that since the Stone Age.
They may even be the great grandchildren of settled, prosperous Amazonian societies, which just outside of living memory have run away from European colonization. Around 1900, there was a massive rubber boom in the Amazon that really saw horrific abuses perpetrated against the Amazonian peoples by different companies from Britain, from the United States.
And so these are people who actually haven't always been like that, but actually are still living well. They've realized that perhaps they don't need to live in cities, they don't need to live in a way which we recognise as being a kind of urban, prosperous society, because they have what they need.
Their ancestors have planted this biome with many, many life-giving species and have developed it to be almost a perfect niche for humans to thrive. And I think that's a really important message to bring home here.
This knowledge of how to live sustainably with the rainforest still exists, but only amongst indigenous communities, but in the Afro-descendant and the mixed-race populations which are kind of living in the Amazon today. You go to any village and they'll be able to point out to you 12, 15, 20 species which they which they use sustainably in about a year's time in november 2025 we're going to have this cop conference the world's climate conference in belém that amazonian city and brazil's president lula has said that you know this is a chance for the world to really learn from the amazon's longest standing inhabitants that humans can live with and within the rainforest in their millions and live well without destroying it.
Absolutely. Well, Lawrence, that's a nice way to end it, going from the ancient times to a big conference that is happening in a year, to the present day and the lessons that we can take from the people who lived in the Amazon thousands of years ago.
Lawrence, this has been fantastic. Lastly, your new book about the ancient Amazon and so much more.
It is out today as well, I believe, and it is called? It's called Patria, Lost Countries of South America. And it's indeed out today in all the bookshops and on e-readers.
And it's an alternative history of South America, a journey through centuries of slightly forgotten or lesser known histories and really trying to put South America back on the map of global history and overturn some of these tropes about guns, germs and steel, which we've all heard. And the Amazon is such a big part of that.
Fantastic. Well, Lawrence, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
Thanks for having me. I've had a great time.
Well, there you go. There was the writer and journalist Lawrence Blair talking you through the amazing story.
That is the ancient civilizations that lived all across the Amazon thousands of years ago and the archaeology that is coming to light that they left behind it's all really really exciting this great diversity of ancient cultures that lived in South America back in ancient times this is a remarkable developing story so keep your eyes peeled for breaking news discoveries coming out of the Amazon in years ahead about these cultures. I do hope you enjoyed today's episode.
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you'll find genuine, empathetic, transformative conversations here on Our Skin.

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