>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> Jason Steinhauer: Well good afternoon thank you. My name is Jason Steinhauer, I'm a program specialist at the John W Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. Today's lecture is presented by the John W Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Kluge Center is a vibrant scholar center on Capital Hill that brings together scholars and researchers from around the world. To distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources, to stimulate, energize one another and to interact with policy makers and the public. The Center offers opportunities for senior scholars, postdoctoral fellows and PhD candidates to conduct research in the Library of Congress collections. We also offer free public lectures, conferences, symposium and other programs. And we administer the Kluge Prize, which recognizes outstanding achievement in the study of humanity. For more information about these and other events, please sign our email list on your way out or visit our website loc.gov slash Kluge. Today's lecture is titled Imagining the Amazon, European Colonialism and the Making of Modern Day Amazonia. Our speaker is Anna Browne Ribeiro, now completing her tenure as a Kluge fellow at the John W Kluge Center. For the past decade Browne Ribeiro has engaged in archeological and ethnic graphic research in the Brazilian Amazon. With a particular focus on anthropogenic or human made landscapes of the deep and recent past. At the Kluge Center, she is working on her book project entitled Rethinking Empty Places, An Archeology of Amazonian Dwelling. Which revises notions of tropical forests by combining archeological evidence with critical rereadings of early accounts of European travels in Amazonia. Her talk today examines how in spite of archeological evidence, that counters such narratives, the language of colonialism, shaped and continues to shape how the Amazon and Amazonian peoples are depicted, conceptualized and most importantly managed. Anna Browne Ribeiro is Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Project, origins culture and environment housed at NPEG in Brazil. In 2013 she was awarded funding by the National Geographic Society for her project history of a crossroads an Amazonian city in deep time. Her current work intro leaves deep historiography of Amazonia and tropical places with data driven geoarcheological and anthropological research with a focus on human environment interactions. Brown Ribeiro received her PhD in anthropology at the University of California Berkeley in 2011. Was a social and biological sciences postdoctoral fellow at the Ohio State University from 2011 to 2013. And then moved to the NPEG as a postdoctoral fellow bridging the cultural anthropology and archeology departments. She has published in the Journal of Archeological Science, Latin American Antiquity and Archeological Review from Cambridge. And has contributed chapters to edited volumes, dealing with travel writing. For the past seven months, she has been a Kluge Fellow at the Kluge Center. So please join me in welcoming Anna Browne Ribeiro. [ Applause ] [ Silence ] >> Anna Brown Ribeiro: Can everyone hear me? Yes, okay. So first of all I wanted to thank Jason for that amazing introduction. And also the Kluge Center for offering me the opportunity to come here and sit down and read and write and get a feel for the history of ethical part of the research which is something I don't normally get to do, when I'm out in the field or teaching classes in Anthropology. Of course the Library of Congress, anyone that works here, the collections officers, the people at the maps room who have helped me for the past few months, gather data that I'm going to be presenting today. As an archeologist of course I love maps, so we're going to be seeing a lot of maps today. And the Kluge Fellows who've offered an amazing environment for me. Both the ones that are here and ones that were here last semester. They have really helped me to open up the way that I think about these histories. And of course thanks to all of you for coming and being here today to hear me talk about my research. Amazonia is a place that is I will show you. Has been profoundly misunderstood in it's history and it's functionality. This has had grievous consequences for the environment and for the people who live there and potentially for the world. What I'm presenting here, I could never have envisioned ten years ago, when I first went to the Amazon. In fact, it took me a year and a half from my first return trip to actually understand that I wanted to go back and why it was that I wanted to go back. It's oddly fitting that I should be here presenting the research from my first book on the Amazon. At the Kluge Center, a place that was made possible through the generosity of John Kluge. Who as it happens also created the fellowship program that got me to the Amazon in the first place. How things circle back. So let's take a look at the Amazon. And I've purposely created this blank slate for us to look at. Just to situate everyone, this is northern South America, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia. Amazonia has historically been portrayed. Hang on a second. As places excessively fragile and primordial or a savage forest. This is made plain in debates over how to conserve, preserve or talk about responsibilities for this place. However, the idea of preserving or reputedly pristine landscape, though appealing to some, must be revised. In light of evidence archeological and ecological that shows us that the Amazon has been very very much modified over the last 2,000 years through human and natural processes and usually the two working in conjunction. The pristine forest that was at times romanticized and at a times demonized by European writers, is a myth. I explore the roots of these misconceptions. We're going to trace the emergents of the pristine forest myth through discovering narratives, enlightenment thought and later anthropological writing. These institutions sedimented these ideas in Western thought and I argue and I think you'll probably see, that they continue to impact the way we think about the Amazon today. During this sort of revisionist work, understanding the things that lie at the roots of our misconceptions, help us to revise our assumptions and think about different possibilities for Amazonia. Part of understanding this is understanding of the landscapes constructed people at the same time people constructed landscapes. The European travelers that took it all in, they understood certain kinds of landscapes to be inhabitable and other kinds of landscapes not. Their first reaction, their first contact with Amazonian landscapes I argue is what eventually the shaped that we see it today. These are what I call the roots of these misconceptions. My work engages with a broader anthropological approach to place. As well as with fundamental methodological issues surrounding narrative, model building and representational troughs. I find place to be a useful concept because it requires an embodied understanding of human existence, that means we exist in our bodies, our minds are not separate from our bodies, we experience the world as material beings in a material world. In the words of Edward Relph, a humanistic geographer who is writing in the 70's, place is primal. It arises momentarily and makes us as we make it. In other words, people, places and times, events, actions are co-constitutive. This means that places are also historically contingent, at every moment a place isn't what it was before and it's never going to be the same. They're meaning latent, someone has to perceive a place to define this as what it is. We're continuously remaking the world, re-signifying it and we're always in place. But since the 1970's anthropologists and archeologists have become increasingly interested in the notion place, as the meeting laden and contingent idea. Drawing upon social theory and philosophies scholars like Tim Ingold, Barbara Bender, Margaret Rodman and Charles Cobb have explored the power of places and landscapes. Considering the material of conditions of our encounters with the world, it's critical to understanding the past. It's critical to understanding as populated, not as a place frozen in them, devoid of human intention. It's important to consider humans as agents, people that were thinking, that were learning, that were deciding whether to continue on a path or to change their actions. And that they have their own histories and their own understandings. But most importantly, it helps us to comprehend out own encounters as scholars with the locations that we visit. And so that we know or at least have an awareness that we might be seeing things in a particular way. There's a figure missing. Okay well I was going to propose, that what we're going to learn about the Amazon is that there's a different kind of order to that place, an order that wasn't was envisioned by Europeans. Europeans were use to certain kinds of landscapes, they had come up in agrarian societies and tempered places and understanding the ecology of a place like the Amazon wasn't something was going to be easy. And they were also coming to the Amazon with particular ideas about the what the tropics or the tourism could or could not support. And they generally thought about that as uninhabitable. And the idea of uninhabitability is really crucial to understanding why the Amazon is treated the way it's treated today. And why those ideas if shifted, could change the way that our future is entangled with its future. The first half of my talk, is going to deal with these encounters and I'm going to focus a lot on the maps, the materials that I got here. They've added a lot to my understanding of the Amazon. I wish I could show you all of the maps that I've found. But I'm just going to, I'm going to do a little snapshot and I'll be happy to talk about some of the other findings that I had afterwards. And then the second half of my talk, I'm going to through a quick archeological example, that comes from my PhD dissertation research. Through which I construct an embodied account of life in the Amazon. And the way that I was able to understand how a landscape was transformed through human action it was completely and entirely contingent on thinking about people as sentient beings that could perceive things, could understand things and could make decisions about how to proceed. Slight disclosure I think Jason already told us a little about this but, I come from historiography and I come from geoarcheology. And for those of you who don't know what geoarcheology is, it's the application of earth science methods to archeological work. And I focused mostly on soil science methods because as you will see, understanding the soils of the Amazon was essential to understanding why certain choices were made, both by Europeans and by Amazonians. In terms of a kinds of resources they would use and the how they would inhabit or not this landscape. And so which Amazon? The Amazon is a complicated thing, because it's not just one thing. The Amazon is several things. In fact I usually the term the Amazon, to talk about this imagined place. Because it can be the Amazon River, the forests that are immediately next to the Amazon Channel, it could be the drainage basin of which is pictured here. But that's problematic because it excludes the Orinoco River Basin which is actually it shares a watershed with the Amazon as you'll see in the next image. It also excludes the Guianas have very similar landscapes but drain entirely to the north and the east. This is an excellent example of a different configuration of the Amazon. It's a study done by NASA scientists on the way that trees green in dry periods. So they're literally collecting light information and creating a map of the greenest portions of South America during the dry season. And what we see looks like a contiguous thing except that the line at the very top of the Amazon, just above Colombia is actually the Orinoco River. So we're including half of the Orinoco River Basin in the Amazon and the other half we're excluding because of green patterns. So Amazonia is really a shifting landscape and the more that I travel in Amazonia and the more that I read, the more I realize that it's not just forest. It's savanna's, it's swamps and these things are changing as climate changes. Which is something that we have to become attuned to. And which is also why it's important to think about the Amazon as inhabited because if you live in a place, then you know what it does. And you're not likely to treat it like any other place. Many times the solutions that people apply to using the Amazon today are these Pan-Amazonian solutions that really don't work in most places because at best they were tested in one location. So we're really not talking about one Amazon. We're talking about many Amazon's that overlap, expand and contract over time. So let's talk about the myth of the Amazon. As Neil White had pointed out the very fact that we call it the Amazon should tell us something. And the very elusiveness of Amazonia on the ground as an entity that can't be bounded. Or as I would put it, our insistence that such an Amazon must exist. Makes it a place that must be imagined. Let's look at how we've imagined it in contemporary times. The largest rain forest on Earth has been touted as the lungs of the world. A global air conditioner and as an essential carbon sink. Of those global ecosystems services Amazonia has been said to provide only the last seems to be true. And apparently diminishing. The other two functions are myths. And apparently the need for myths is great. As far as Amazonia is concerned at least. Mythologies arise, circulate, diminish and often come back to haunt us and they will today. Regardless of whether these myths are true, they serve a function. They tell us today why we should care about a place that seems so very very far away in both space and in time. Thanks to these myths we have an awareness that Amazonia is important to the future of the Earth in some way. Whether it has to do with environmental preservation, climate change, conscious consumerism or on occasion indigenous or human rights. These particular myths also tell us something about our ideas about Amazonia. That it's still possible to locate the magnificent and the horrifying in a place we have known for nearly 500 years. Known but not understood. Occasionally I do a search on the internet for the Amazon. And after I've filtered through all the search results for the site, I usually come up with images like these. People advertising it's nature or people calling for it's salvation. Rarely do we see pictures of people. But people made the Amazon. So we need to rethink this. And when I first traveled to the Amazon, even though I knew that I was going to an archeological dig and I knew that I was going to be excavating things that people did, I still had these images in my head. And I think a lot of us do or a lot of us hope to. And that's something to explore and that's something that's kind of beyond the scope of what I do. But I just want to throw that out there. I remember thinking, on the plane, I'm going to the Amazon. I'm going to the Amazon. How cool is that. So I want to talk about that Amazon, that mystical mythical place that we learn about in school and through film and even through reputable news outlets. How did this place come to be? Even on the map the Amazon was discovered and labeled as the sweet sea in 1500. It wasn't until February of 1541 that people understood it as a river. It was in that month that Gonzalo Pizarro, then governor of [inaudible] a province located in modern day Peru, went in search of the fabled land of cinnamon, [foreign language]. There he hoped to extract at a fraction of a cost a spice that could be valued on a par with the coveted Sri Lankan cinnamon. And in the enthusiasm of the day, Pizarro saw the new world as the land of opportunity. And sought not only the land of cinnamon but also the fabled city Manoa or El Dorado. El Dorado is one of the names of the fabled city of gold. Also known simply as Dorado, Manoa del Dorado, Parime, Patiti, the lake of gold, the castle of gold and several other names. El Dorado features in discovery and scientific narratives for centuries as late as the 18th century. So what we're looking at here, is an archeological object. That's attributed to the muisca people and they were known in Colombia apparently legend has it that the king would adorn himself in gold annually as part of a renewal ceremony and then he would bath in a lake. And many who will think that this is the origin of the myth of El Dorado but as you'll see El Dorado gets located much further away, not 50 years later. When I talk about El Dorado, I'm also indexing other kinds of narratives of treasure and I know that I have green hell here, that should really say green hell or paradise. Because depending on your perspective it could be either. So I'm talking about the idea of an earthly paradise which Europeans were also seeking in the new world. I'm talking about our Garden of Eden, a land of plenty or opportunity or in the words of Voltaire's Candide, the best of all possible worlds. After ten months of fruitless voyaging Pizarro and his crew found themselves entering an unknown forested valley. Hungry and dangerously low on supplies, the party stopped, sending captain Francisco de Orellana down the Coca River. With a small crew in search of salvation. The small crew was completely unprepared for the size and force of the [inaudible] or so they would later report. This along with their utter ignorance of the terrain, a green hell by some accounts. Combined to make a return journey impossible. Instead Orellana and his men journeyed down river to the east. Completing the first fully recorded decent of the Amazon River. And I think it's crucial here that Orellana and his men were not planning to do this and didn't know where they were going to end up. Because the narrative that we get from the journals, even though it falls in the genre of survival literature, is free of some of the ethnological thinking, protoethnological thinking that later structures narratives of this place. It would be another 100 years before anybody was able to complete the journey and it was done in the opposite direction and the narrative that we get then isn't June 21st we stop for food, people were friendly. It sounds more like, well these are the people, these are their customs, this is how they eat. And so instantly the Amazon, that is a place the size of Europe, is reduced to a single point in time. And all of the people that live in it and all of the landscapes, are equalized and this is what sticks. The term green hell by the way comes from a narrative by a historian, some say a very well, I would say to sort of dubious reliability named Garcilaso de la Vega. He was born just about the time that the voyage was departing in 1540 and he was writing 60 years later. And he was gathering not only accounts of this voyage but of several other voyages and he was writing a history of the kingdom of Peru. And his work comes up later because he was paying attention to other things that were being reported and then he gets cited as well. So part of what I'm doing, even though I'm looking at images and I'm looking at maps, is I'm tracing how these ideas flow from one place to another. So, not long after that, we get an early map of the Amazon, now this isn't the first one that I found but it's interesting. Because it's the first one that I found here and this is here by the way. That has the earliest one I should say, that has not just a representation of the river and it's course more or less. But it also has images of people, right and actually this fantastic snake like representation of the river appears over and over again. But I just want to call your attention to what's happening right in the middle of the scene, which is the scene of cannibalism. Even though the only story of cannibalism that people had at the time was from the shorelines. They've located this in the Amazon. What's happening on the shorelines is still maybe something to be considered primitive, we have hunting people live in huts or tents. But the cannibals are in that unknown place. So now let's look, systematically at some of these maps and what I've done is I've split them up, we're just going to look at two periods. Because they have different patterns to them. So this is the earliest map that is in the Library of Congress. And one of the things I love about it, is that it's actually very true to what people knew. We don't have the whole outline of the continent, we know the river is huge. We know that it goes from Iquitos which is in the mountains to the ocean and that's all that we have. And the names of all the tributaries or peoples. So, even though the outline isn't great it's actually, one of the more accurate early maps in terms of what it represents, what it presents to the world. And then we get at the other end of the spectrum, a map by Giacomo Gastaldi and we think that it's his and that it was made some time between 1550 and 1556. None of his maps were signed but it's been attributed to him. And he's done some interesting things, the river flows north to the south or rather south to north. Iquitos is kind of right next to the coast, so he wasn't working with particularly good notes but it's a very pretty map, with lots of mountains. Most of which aren't where he's put them. The other thing that he's done that I haven't seen in any of the maps before 1590, is that he's got the Castillo del Oro, the castle of gold at the very top of the map, you'll see that in the closeup. And it's the only one that I've found here where that's actually mapped some place. And the practice of mapping things, even though people don't know where they are was actually quite prevalent. Which I suppose I should have expected. And then as a sort of middle of the road map, we get this very very busy map again with an unknown author, of unknown authorship. And there's no mention of any gold castles, we have I think slightly better river courses so he's got a little bit more information. Probably some things coming from the Portuguese at one end and from the Peruvians on the other or from Iquitos at the other end. But a lot of these early maps are almost illegible because they're so busy and they're so full of wind roses and flags. But it's interesting to see that that's what's important. What's important is that there are cities and anytime someone mentions of people, this author has drawn a castle, which I think is amazing. Because that goes away very quickly. So initially it was just assumed that these were all civilizations that built castles, just like they have in Europe and so they have their flags and they have the name of the king. So, that is very different from what I expected to find. So then I asked myself what happened? Right, what changed? Because when you get to the 1590's and I actually think this map isn't from 1590 which is what's listed here I think it's from, it almost has to be from after 1595 and I'll tell you why in a second, I hate to mysterious but no I love it. Is that we get the, the Parime lake which I've tried to highlight here and again a slightly closer view of it. Which is the lake of gold. And it's in the Guianas, it might also be referenced as Manao but it's the first time that it appears in this place. And then it just appears in all of the maps after that. Right up until 1750, possibly beyond. Right around then, around 1748 people start being a little bit more cautious so, some of the authors like Guillaume Sanson will still represent the lake and try to give it a size, the dimension and put it amongst mountains as the description suggests and some of them will just say well here's where I would put the lake of gold if I was sure that it was here. But it's interesting that they don't, they don't just exclude it, they say this is where some people say the lake of gold exists. And that happens in several languages, it happens in several editions. So it's a practice, it's people beginning to think about representing things in maps in a different way. So what happens at the end of the 16th century that has changed the way that these representations occur. Well apparently Sir Walter Raleigh happened. He journeyed from England, he was very desperate to gain the favors of the crown, he was desperate to find this place. And he writes this narrative of going to northern South America to the Guianas and searching for this lake and talking to people and what we actually think happened is that he talked to a Spaniard, some Spaniards who'd been there longer and gotten these narratives from indigenous peoples. And they were telling him that yes there is a lake of gold and lies just beyond the mountains. And there's actually been some interesting archeological done, work done to think about why these stories of gold were happening here. But it's also interesting to note that people are talking about gold coming from this place called Manao all over northern South America. And we do know that there were extensive trade fruits that crisscrossed northern South America at that time, the time that Europeans came so, it's conceivable that it was just the case of someone saying oh it's just over the mountain, things actually being a lot further away. Needless to say no such lake exists but there is a marshland there that when it's flooded, semiannually might look a little bit like Sir Walter Raleigh's representation of the map which I didn't put in. Sorry. So how, so Sir Walter Raleigh happened and what's so important about him? The only thing that's important about him is that everybody was reading him. He was considered one of the greatest sort of trappers, he was given prominence in his writing, as someone who had been there. And at the time people that have traveled were given credit for things and Richard Hakluyt actually explicitly acknowledges Sir Walter Raleigh as the person from whom he received his most reliable information. So Richard Hakluyt founded the Hakluyt Society, he wrote the Principal Navigation's and he was very highly regarding and endorsing Sir Walter Raleigh. He basically backed things that he said and that has to be the reason that everybody puts the lake where they do even though no one ever sees it, for as long as they do. Some also suggest that people were reading Garcilaso de la Vega and particularly his accounts of cannibalism, which is something that we might come back to. Depending on the time. The other thing I wanted to point out is that, at the time that these authors were constructing these maps, maps were full of monsters and writing full of monsters and that was normal. Right I mean we're talking about 1550's up to 1650, we're in a premodern science context, prescientific paradigm. So it's not surprising that some of these maps contain these fantastical elements. What is surprising is that even though we know that fairytales don't exist today, that we still locate them in the Amazon. And that they survived you know a couple of centuries of pretty rigorous scientific thought, how did this happen? So I draw upon the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's specifically for this but also of people that study travel writing like Mary Louise Pratt, her work on how the intellectual movements of the enlightenment sort of solidified a lot of these ideas as really important. But I also draw a lot upon Neil Whitehead who was a historian, a anthropologist and historiographer of the Amazon. But this idea circulation that I use substantially, particularly in this article, comes from Linda Tuhiwai Smith who is a Maori Scholar. And one of the things she says is that distance is very important in constructing these narratives. These two images of the Amazon, the green hell and El Dorado or if you want to call them the optimistic and pessimistic narrative, they became the basis for future understandings of Amazonia. Which was one of these really far away places and I think it's really important that there was a year in between the first decent of the Amazon and the second. Because that gave people a lot of time to refigure some of these early narratives and write them into their ideas of what the place could and couldn't support and eventually what it meant to be savaged or I think the cannibalistic narratives kind of helped in that and what it meant to be civilized. So it's interesting that Amazonia and maybe a couple of other places in the world still have these mythical reputations, because a lot of places were far away back then. And so we're going to come back to this but the discourse of the inhabitability or the underlying notion of uninhabitability is very important to this as well. But let's just think about how these ideas were created, so a set of people set off on a journey. They collected data and wrote some narratives which were then sent back to Europe where they were read by scholars, recirculated exchanged, resignified. Particularly if you're talking about from 1650 onward people are starting to try to systematize the Earth, Europeans are creating systems of taxonomy, they're getting better understandings of geography, they're understanding longitude, they're creating better maps. And they're trying to create systems of order or ordering the world. And so what happens is that these archetypal images of people come into being and they also, they come into being not just along with images of places but in the context of images of places. I was really shocked at the length of the discussion that Charles Marie de La Condamine who's pictured here, who was sent off to measure the equator, he was a cartographer. The amount of time that he spent talking about things like the Amazons and El Dorado it seems an inordinately long amount of time but evidently this was something that had to be grappled with in terms of the order that was being constructed and it also functioned in that order. I argue that places like the Amazon where the foil against which civilization was constructed. Oh, I always forget to say this. These ideas of El Dorado and green hell they still circulate and not just in the media. But also in anthropological and archeological text. El Dorado was sited just in 2001. So. Places were co-constructed with subjects. And this is the opposition that we're left with. And one of the things that I've noticed is that those ideas still exist. Except today's green hell isn't uncontacted tribes, although occasionally that becomes part of the lost paradise narrative. It's deforestation. It's burning, it's the lose of the atmospheric carbon sink and on the other side of the coin, we have this green jungle, the optimism for life, the exuberance people going to try to name species or discover curious pharmacological research and as late as earlier last century there was a lot of sort of mining going on in the area. So there was a lot of optimism, there's a very old idea that the tropics produce everything in excess and I think that's something that continues to be carried through. The other thing that I get from Linda Tuhiwai Smith is this really important connection that she makes and I think other scholars make too, with the idea of property. And I think she's not pointing out the property issue but she's looking at Locke and he says that as much land that man tills, plants, improves or cultivates and can use the products of so much is his property. So essentially if you're an agriculturist then you can claim property and be civilized. And one of the problems that Europeans have faced over the centuries in the Amazon is that they can't seem to tame it. Many projects have tried and failed, the Portuguese initially tried to setup what they considered to be functional colonies, growing cotton, the soils of the Amazon are not appropriate for this, we're going to be looking at that in a second. But at the same time there's this idea that you have to be able to master nature in order to be civilized. And if Europeans insisted on seeing the Amazonian jungle as pristine, then of course they could never have mastered that nature. And I think at the root of this idea of this excessive and exuberant nature that can't be mastered and this is just an idea because as the archeological narrative shows it has been and can be. This is the route of both the green hell and the paradise narrative. And as soon as we take down that notion, then both of those images collapse. So if we go back to the idea of an untouched jungle, we know that no longer exists. And it's also not worth preserving which is something that we should think about for the future. But it also means that there have been different ways of managing the landscape that weren't agrarian. And that is what the archeological narrative shows us. So I'm not going to get into this idea about the plough but there's a very clear connection between agriculture and society. This comes from Hobbes's De Cive on civility on civilization. And on the one side we have imperium which is order and there are people farming and on the other side of course we have the natives they're based on American images, right sort of native American's or savaged peoples. And not only are they brandishing bows and hunting but they're also just off to the side of the picture, there's a cannibal, there's a scene of cannibalism happening. So there's a very clear opposition between agriculture and not an agriculture and there's a closeup of that. So these oppositions that are setup in the merging scientific narratives get picked up in other language and anthropological thought. Particularly the narrative about agriculture. One of the things that is crucial to the development of complex societies, which is the archeological or anthropological version of the idea of civilization, is that people must be able to produce an agricultural surplus, if it's impossible to produce an agricultural surplus or if those peoples haven't engineered technologies that could produce an agricultural surplus, then there is no wealth to be amassed. And then there can be no inequality and then there can be no dominion, no kingship, no social hierarchy. So social complexity and anthropology is based entirely on the idea that a complex society has multiple levels of hierarchy. Which is also a notion that's been challenged and yet people continue to do research in the Amazon and in other places that aren't suited to monocultures particularly looking for the staple crop. Which is an idea that really only makes sense in tempered climates. So again, the narrative persists. And I just wanted to point out, I pulled this up yesterday. That sometimes the image of the green hell and the lost paradise coexists. And I think they particularly coexist in these kinds of stories that pull up images of so called uncontacted tribes that were discovered in the Amazon. And I had a quote from the story, but essentially National Geographic sensationalizes this image of what they call tribal warriors looking up in alarm at a plane that flew over their camp which is something that isn't suppose to happen with uncontacted tribes. And just to clarify because the stuff has come up. The unconcated tribe isn't a tribe that hasn't been contacted, it's a tribe that at least in the Brazilian government speech, that there has been an agreement that people will be limiting contact. So it's not that people don't know that these independent, sovereign tribes exist,but there has been an agreement that there will not be commerce of any kind social or otherwise in between government agents and the tribes. And so when you see a picture like this it's not a savage coming into contact with the modern world, we're not looking at something that's frozen in time. This is a breach of a contract that's being filmed. So let's get the story straight. And I do like to talk about the tyranny of the plough because I think at least in archeology we have become slaves to the idea that we have to find agricultural societies in order to find civilization, which is also code for interesting places to work. And so if you don't have evidence of metallurgy, big temples or monumental architecture and mass agriculture then people often think that there's nothing to research. And what Amazonian archeologists have been showing for the last 30 years is that they're very wrong. And so I'm going to talk quickly, Jason how we doing on time? Okay. I'm going to talk quickly about Terra Preta which is sometimes translated to English as indigenous black earth and this is a term that's used in Brazil very commonly [foreign language] means that it's a black soil that was of the Indian, right of the indigenous person but also made by those people. And I think that's really important to point out and so when people talk about indigenous black earth I don't think that really captures the full meaning. What do we know about Terra Preta? That is a carbon and nutrient-rich soil. That is always associated with large amounts of occupational debris so there's a lot of ceramics and sometimes fawn of remains or remains of bones. Occasionally human remains as well and plant remains. And usually very very very dense, scatters of these things if you look at the image on the right, with the archeologists trowel laying out on what looks like rocks, those are all ceramic sherds and that's a undisturbed piece of land that we just walked on. They're often situated on bluffs that's not particularly interesting I think anymore, but what's really interesting is that they're more stable and less acidic than oxisols. And oxisols are the dominant soils in the central Amazon where I work, they're slightly different classifications for a lot of the soils, right near the Amazon but most of them are very oxidized, they're very old, they can be up two million years old. And these sites often have earthworks and some of them are very large and some of them are very small. And I'm going to talk a little bit about what you might call medium sized, house sized earthworks. Why do we care about Terra Preta? Well if you look at the dominant Amazonian soil, to the right the oxisol, there's less than five centimeters of humus. And most of that if you clear cut that land, goes away within a year or two. And even if you don't you're not going to get very good return for planting there. So farmers recognize when they see at the Terra Preta that they're going to get much better returns from farming. Also the deep root the Terra Preta is, the longer people have inhabited that space. There's no correlation in terms of inches or centimeters, depth and time but, something that I think, that's about 50 or 60 centimeters deep is probably a very long term occupation and when we have hiatus's we now understand that there are different kinds of soils that intervenes, so that is a continuous occupation. And I'm going to show you the site that I worked for my dissertation and it only has about 20 centimeters of soil and I think we're looking at 800 years. So, this site and I think is [foreign language]. We know we're looking at something that started around 500 BC and went right up until just about contact. Stability is the other thing. So not only are these soils more nutrient-rich but the can be farmed for longer periods. So even if you clear cut and do a monoculture on a Terra Preta soil which isn't recommended, you can still farm that soil for up to ten years, opposed to two to three. Sometimes people stretch it to five but they're really not getting very much return for their labor when they do that. So, at the top, on the right, is one of the densest, darkest Terra Preta sites that I have worked on in the central Amazon. It is I believe at least 30 hectares in size, they're are very large mounds some of which are funerary, some of which we haven't quite understood yet. And if you look at the bottom that site [foreign language] has been farmed in this way with several monocultures for over 25 years. I will say that we know that the current owner does use soil amendments but the advantage is that they don't get washed into the river. Which is what usually happens if you use NPK or potash those sorts of things on regular Amazonian soils, so another bonus for the environment. So, why do we care about, what do I care about Terra Preta, I think archaeologically there's lots of reasons to care. They emerge all across the Amazon, very quickly it seems to be phenomenon that spreads from one end of the Amazon to the other in the space of a couple hundred years. By about 1100 AD, there are massive sites with palisades and earthworks at several of the major crossroads, so we have a technology that has spread and yet we have different kinds of ceramic traditions which indicates different, at the very least different stylistic ideas or creative trends and potentially different ethnicities if you look at the distances on a map. It's not absurd to think that we're talking about different ethnicities using the same sets of practices. So what it represents is the tremendous change in the way that humans are relating to the environment. And one of the key questions that people have is, well did they know what they were doing? And so it's something that I've been researching and I think that the best answer is that initially they didn't and at some point they figured it out. Because there are some groups in the Amazon today that make a sort of Terra Preta to use as gardens intentionally. Some of them are indigenous and some of them are what we in Brazil call traditional farming groups which is an officially recognized government category of people that have been inhabiting the Amazon for a certain number of years and have a different way of interacting with each other and with Brazilian civil society. Then Brazilians would but they aren't necessarily indigenous because of shifting populations and there's a lot going on there but let's just say multiethnic communities that live in the forest using some traditional practices and some of which might have been learned from indigenous populations or a throop heredity. I'm interested in how these things were formed at the level the individual. Because I think that if we can find out how people were able to make the soil then, it shouldn't be that hard to replicate. It is hard to figure out how they did it. And so what I did, was I appealed to soil science. And I also started studying the way that, that sites were made in the present, so as people inhabit a space, what are the kinds of things that happen? What is the evidence of these everyday repeated actions which we call practices? And one of the things that one of my mentors pointed out is that these earth ovens, in this case it's a brick oven but usually they're earth ovens. That people use create a certain kind of charcoal, that's a really important ingredient in Terra Preta. And so that was the first thing that I noticed that made me think that maybe we should be studying more than the soil but also the things that are in the soil. So normally a soil science will take, soil scientist will take a soil sample and grind it up and put into a machine and analyze it. And what I did with a host of undergraduate students, there were more than 20 people helping me in the lab, was we didn't crush the samples, we separated everything and we analyzed all the little bits of the things that were in these soils to try to understand what were the things that contributed to the formation of Terra Preta and what are the things that told us what people were doing at any given time on a particular piece of a site. And we're talking I was looking, I was comparing areas about the size of this room, so medium to large house areas to each other. And so in addition to looking at tiny pieces of charcoal or charred plant remains we also ended up looking at tiny tiny pieces of ceramics or burnt clay which might have come from ovens. They would've looked different from this one but, we've excavated some things that look a little bit like earth ovens. Moving right along bio-char is the most important ingredient for Terra Preta because it's very very stable. And it also holds onto other kinds of nutrients. If you put bio-char together with little pieces of bone, appetite then you get an extremely strong bond that makes these soils even more fertile, so it's important not only people were burning things but they were cooking. Right or that they were burning garbage that contained animal remains, probably cooking would've happened in the unintentional scenario and the burning garbage with animal remains in the intentional scenario. Right so initially people would've figured it out and then they would've started doing the intentional burning. So I'm looking, this is from my friend Morgan Schmidt's work with the Kuikuru Indians in upper Xingu, they make middens intentionally, they cultivate them in the sense that they order the way that they dispose of garbage and then they will use certain parts of the middens as gardens depending on how long they've been sort of simmering. And so here we have banana trees and lemon trees and lime trees, things that wouldn't be growing on Amazonian soils, growing right in peoples backyards. Very quickly this is the village, the orange blobs are houses and the things behind them are the middens, the mounds of dark earth that people use for gardens. So in the central Amazon, there's lots of beautiful pottery. I did a study like this at a site that consisted of 12 mounds that we thought were houses. We excavated them and we found out that did seem [inaudible] to be constructed underneath the platform which is the clay floor that has the horizontal lines. Is a very charcoal rich soil which I initially thought would be like a Terra Preta but upon analysis realized that that was a garden soil. Some of the houses had gardens underneath them and some of the houses had other houses underneath them. Plotting this spatially. I'm sorry to move so fast I get a sequence of occupation so we started with one house, that house eventually sprouted other houses and these houses were starting to be built on platforms. We're not exactly sure why yet. But eventually the entire landscape and this is a circumscribed peninsula that was entirely taken up by houses. Right up to the flood line. And so what happens when you circumscribe people on a piece of land and you're depositing all of your garbage next to your houses is that you get very very rich soils, very quickly. And so I recently published an article that demonstrates that this is how the soils were transformed suddenly through a combination of population growth and circumscription. They overwhelmed the ecosystem and transformed what would have been a very sterile soil into a very productive soil. This demonstrates that people were instrumental in instigating ecological change but that in this case they didn't seem to be doing it on purpose. That they were there for several hundred years, so I don't know if you caught the chronology but we're going from about 300 to 500 AD to 800 AD, so that's 500 years. And that they were investing in constructing this landscape in a particular way in spite of the fact that they were sacrificing their farmland. And so evidently farmland wasn't terribly important. So if you think about the way people occupied space then and think about the way people occupy space now, we might be able to come up with better strategies for managing the Amazon. Very quickly going back to the picture of the village, what I want to emphasize is that as long as someone is inhabiting this space, they're going to be invested in thinking about how to make it better. As long as were just using it and extracting things from it, for the purposes of the outside world, then we have no chance of preserving it. So thinking about the Amazon as a global carbon sink, might help in the short run but isn't really particularly helpful in thinking about how we inhabit the Amazon. I don't know whether I should tell everybody to go live there, probably not, but I think that the solution is the project that I'm running now or one potential solution is to work with communities independently to see how they manage their landscapes, see what we can offer in terms of archaeological evidence, archaeological narratives, tactics to try to help them create a better management system so that their growing populations can be well articulated with this very complex ecosystem. That doesn't respond well to [inaudible] cultural. So, all that being said, thank you to all of the people that made this possible including all of you. And I'm through. Thank you. [ Applause ] Two minutes for questions? Two minutes for questions. Yes? >> What happen after 800? You said this was going from 300 to 800 AD? >> Anna Brown Ribeiro: So we actually think it went on until 1100 but we don't have a date for 1100. But that's when most of the sites in that area stopped being inhabited or they changed hands. And so we actually think happened is this case is that a different group moved in up river. [ Inaudible Question ] Well I, so I think what I'm trying to say is, that in that particular case, Terra Preta stopped being produced and we think it's because a different group moved in from upper and they didn't have those practices that created the soils, they actually, we actually that they took some of these mounds and they took them down and spread them out to create larger agricultural fields. So these are people that were coming from the south and east and they were moving through. And we have some evidence for warfare that suggests that. If you go to the Madeira River, just down the river and then up a little bit, we actually have Terra Preta that's being manufactured up until 1700. Along with ceramics that are continuous with this tradition. So in some parts of the Amazon the practice continued. But so much, the population were so destructuralized after European encounter, particularly because of disease, that it's very hard to pinpoint where that came from and the group that's in the upper Shengru we're fairly certain have nothing to do with these groups that were in the central Amazon. And so, again I'm thinking about this is a kind of technology that spread and can be utilized again. [ Inaudible Question ] So I you said conference or conflict? Either? Yeah I. I have not seen any specific references in text and if you have I would love to see them. I do think it's very clear that in the Amazon the [inaudible] were also trying to create little replicas of good Spanish or Portuguese towns with peasants that had particular jobs and they had these very rich realized ways of instituting sort of village status replace and creating rectilinear streets. They had these prescriptions for establishing settlements that envisioned a particular kind of landscape that they wanted to reproduce in the Amazon. And the idea that there were this exuberant nature, made it seem eminently possible. But the thing that they weren't able to understand I think was two things. First of all that there had been no impetuous to agriculture before so a lot of the peoples that they were trying to convince to come live in these towns had no interest in living in them. They had no interest in wages, they had no interested in tilling the land and of course it was a fruitless venture in most places in the Amazon. I mean we see it happening towards the Vazia [assumed spelling], which is actually sorry towards the flood plane area, let me speak English. In the [inaudible] area, which is again a different Amazon but as we move up river it becomes virtually impossible and you constantly see letters written to Europe of people complaining, oh I can't keep the neophytes here, they keep running away, I need more labor, can we have different rules for descending Indians, can we go and try to find other people and some of these are, you know there's good and the bad and the ugly. But there's definitely this, this idea that's being pushed and they're running up against all kinds of, there's an incommensurability between what they expect to see and what they envision as good earth, good earth is one of the things that they site, oh this is good earth, this is bad earth as they go down, this is good country, this is bad country. And what ideas that already existed about what as a good way to inhabit the landscape and what was fruitful. >> Jason Steinhauer: I think we'll just stop there. Please join me in thanking Anna. [ Applause ] And just a quick announcement. We are back here on the 26th of January which is actually a Tuesday. Unusual for us as we're usually on Thursday's, but on Tuesday the 26th we have the privilege of welcoming back our most recent Maguire Chair, David Hollenbach to deliver the annual Maguire Address. He'll be discussing ethical responsibilities towards refugees and people displaced by war. So if you are interested in that, please join us. Please sign our email list on the way out to learn about upcoming events and please join me again in thanking Anna for her talk today. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.