Professor Eduardo Góes Neves

Greg Clark

Well, Professor Eduardo Góes Neves, what a pleasure to have you on The DNA of Cities where we’re looking at Amazon cities. Eduardo, please begin. To you, what is The DNA of Amazon Cities?

Eduardo Góes Neves

Hello to everyone. Hello, Professor Clark. It’s a pleasure to be here. I think the DNA of the Amazonian City is an openness towards nature. We see that in the ancient cities of the Amazon, but we also still see it today. Not so much being in the big cities of the Amazon, but in the outskirts of the big cities and also in the small towns of the Amazon. It’s a way of being in the world that doesn’t separate the domains of the domestic life from the domains of nature.

Greg Clark

This is a wonderful answer and I’m going to ask you to tell us a little bit more about the ancient cities and how this lack of separation between life and nature, culture and nature. How do we know that that’s been true for a long time, what do you see in the ancient cities?

Eduardo Góes Neves

Well, this lack of separation in a way is what makes the study of the ancient cities of the Amazon so difficult. Because if we use as a parameter, for instance, the ancient polis of the Greek, like the ancient walled city, which was well known in many places in the world, we’re not going to find it in the Amazon. There are no such things like walls and very well-defined enclosures. So that makes it very difficult for people to identify these settlements as ancient cities.

The first person that really talked in a serious way about ancient urbanism in the Amazon is my good friend Professor Michael Heckenberger from the University of Florida. He’s a great archaeologist, he's been working in the Amazon for over 30 years. Michael published an article in Science back in 2008 where he talks about ancient urbanism and he uses a concept which I think really, it’s still very useful and important for us to try to understand those ancient cities, which is the concept of garden city. That’s something that comes from British urbanism from the 19th Century, Ebenezer Howard. It’s kind of interesting because here in São Paulo, where part of the city development was made by British companies in the early 20th Century, we have the garden cities, some of the fences and the nicer neighbourhoods here in São Paulo are called jardins in Portuguese or gardens in English. So Michael went back to Howard and took this concept to try to explain how those ancient garden cities may have worked. How do we find them? If it’s so difficult to find them, I mean, that’s maybe the most important question that we have.

I’ll start answering by talking about the difficulties that we have now labelling the archaeological sites that we find in the Amazon. Since the 1990s and even before that, we’ve been finding some very large sites, several dozen hectare-wide sites, some of them connected by roads, paths. We can talk about a constellation of settlements being connected by those ancient road systems if I may use this expression. Traditionally, the kind of categories that we would use as archaeologists to nominate these kinds of settlements would be a big site, large village. We always have to have some kind of objective to qualify the dimension of those places. And those categories, like a 'large site', they may work for some archaeologists but they’re very awkward if one wants to establish some kind of conversation with colleagues working in other disciplines and even with the public at large. So that’s why we begin to say, why are we not calling these things cities? I mean, if they are large, if some of them are larger than contemporary small settlements in the Amazon, which are called cities, why not calling those places cities as well? I mean, much of the study about ancient urbanism comes from this kind of like difficulties in finding a way to employ the ancient, the traditional, typological categories in archaeology to describe those large settlements.

Greg Clark

This is very clear. Just for the benefit of our listeners, could you give us some sense of the timeline of the history of the ancient cities or settlements or large sites of the Amazon? How many people were living in the Amazon? At what periods of time? From the point of view of what we can tell. And for how long was this continuous pattern of settlement or movement there?

Eduardo Góes Neves

Well, the settlement of the Amazon started around 13,000 years ago. So it is as old as anywhere else in the New World. I mean, the evidence that we have suggests that by the time of the arrival of the Portuguese and Spaniards in 1492, there were around between 8 and 10 million people living in what we call the Greater Amazon, which is the Amazon Basin and the tropical areas here in northern South America, parts of Venezuela and The Guianas as well.

Along this long history of Indigenous occupation, we begin to see the earliest forms of settlement concentration. The large sites, they began to form around 2,500 years ago. But we can really say that the peak of the ancient urbanism in the Amazon, it’s something that dates from the beginning of the Common Era or the Christian Era. So for instance, some of the largest sites that we have today, they date from between 1,500 and 1,000 years ago.

Greg Clark

This is so helpful and I’m very grateful to you for this. So the big question I need to ask you is about how the settlement of the Amazon today is illuminated by the history that you’ve been describing. What patterns do you see in the way that people live in and with Amazonia today that you think reflect the historical and anthropological history that’s here?

Eduardo Góes Neves

That’s very interesting. We have many, many clues. I mean, some of those clues, once we find out about them, they became very obvious. Again, it takes traditional knowledge and some kind of archaeological research to help us see those features. But one of the things, I mean, it’s very common when one travels throughout the Amazon to find that the contemporary cities or settlements are located on the top of archaeological sites. Some of the largest cities in the Amazon today like Manaus, for instance, and Santarém, they’re all built on the top of archaeological sites.

There’s a particular kind of archaeological site, which brings a very strong connection between the past, the present, and also the future, which is what we call in Portuguese terras pretas or anthropic dark earths in English. Those terrace pretas, in Portuguese, terrace pretas mean dark soils. Those dark soil sites, these terras pretas, those dark soils, they’re very fertile and they allow for the continuous cultivation of the same places time and again, every year. Normally in the tropics because of the extreme conditions of rainfall and exuviation, that’s a technical term that we use, the nutrients are washed from the soils after they’ve been fertilised. But in the case of the dark soils, they remain. They retain that fertility for centuries or even millennia. That’s what we call very stable soils because they’re able to keep their fertility throughout time. We know today that those dark soils were created by Indigenous people in the past. In many cases, some of the ancient cities that we find, the one way that we have to find those places are through the location of the dark soils. I’m not saying here that every dark soil site corresponds to an ancient city. But in many cases in the central Amazon, for instance, where I’ve worked for many years, the large sites, what you call the urban settlements, they’re normally associated to those dark soils. For many years until the 1990s, there was a big debate whether those soils were natural or created by Indigenous people. It was only in the 1990s that people actually said, you know, the evidence was brought to say, listen, these are soils which were created by Indigenous people in the past.

The dark soils are interesting because people today, contemporary, Indigenous populations and Amazonian peasants, newcomers in the Amazon, they look for these places to cultivate. So you can see an interesting connection between the past, again, the present and the future. Dark soil sites, they cover roughly between 2% and 3% of the Amazon, which doesn’t look like much in a way. But if you think that the Amazon is larger than the Western Europe, we’re talking about a very big chunk of land which was modified by Indigenous people in the past. So the dark soils are good.

It’s interesting if you look at the chronology of dark soils formation, we know that there’s some ancient dark soils that go back to around 5,000 years ago, but most of them began to form from around 2,500 years ago onwards. So there’s an interesting match between this process of population growth and also the formation of the anthropic soils that we call terras pretas in Portuguese. I mean, that’s one example. I can give you some more if you want.

Greg Clark

Well, let me ask you one question about the dark soils and then some more examples would be wonderful. I appreciate so much your knowledge and your wisdom here. Just for the benefit of those who are listening, how did the ancient Indigenous populations create these dark soils? What did they know and what did they do?

Eduardo Góes Neves

I’ve spent many years of my life dealing with this question, so thank you for asking it. I mean, those soils are known since the 19th Century. People knew about them. Normally, if you go to a dark soil place, one will find many pot shards associated to it. So there was a clear association back in the 19th Century already between archaeological sites and the dark soils. But most people suggested that it was the natural fertility of those soils that attracted people to live there in the first place. The hypothesis that we had, people suggested volcanic ashes, uplifts from lake bottoms and things like that. But when people begin to systematically map the distribution of artefacts, ceramic artefacts and the nutrient values within the sites, they found out that there was a positive correlation between places with larger concentration of ceramics, for instance, and larger value of nutrients in the dark soils, that the positive correlation was established. People were able to say, listen, there’s clear evidence that those soils were created by Indigenous people.

But then there was an interesting discussion going back maybe 20 years ago. Some people say, wow, this is really cool. So these fellows, they were producing those soils deliberately to improve the natural conditions of the soils in the Amazon. They’re doing some kind of ancient agronomical large scale soil transformation pattern. But I’ve dug many of these, you know, I’ve spent many years of my life digging the sites. In all of the cases where I worked, I could see that there was a clear, again, correlation between domestic areas and the areas where the soils were deeper and the nutrient values were higher.

So me and other people would begin to say, listen, maybe, I mean, they became aware eventually that those soils were very fertile, but maybe initially they’re making them through things like composting. Just taking the organic garbage, digging pits in the back of their houses and throwing their garbage, you know, their organic remains. I have a very good friend who’s a wise man, a very wise man called Carlos Augusto da Silva. He’s also an archaeologist, who lives and has been working in the Amazon for many years. His father was a rubber tapper and Carlos, he grew up in a small settlement in the forest. He tells me that when he was a kid, there used to be no garbage. The whole concept of garbage, it’s something that he learned when he moved to live in Manaus, which is a big city. Because all the organic remains, they were utilised. People were putting them in the soil, they’re adding them to the soil to improve soil fertility. He tells me all the time, 'my grandmother used to do this.' So, I mean, we think, and we have new data that backs this hypothesis up, that initially people were just spending a lot of time in the same place. They became more sedentary. As a consequence, they were producing more organic residues, if I may use this expression, things like charcoal. Charcoal, not the ashes that you see when you burn a place with very high temperatures, but low temperature fires producing charcoal, which has wonderful chemical properties. So the pot shards, the charcoal, the seeds, the bone remains of fishes and other animals, these things were mixed together in pits, added to the soil. And this operation, working over decades, many years, created those dark soil areas.

Greg Clark

Eduardo, this is a wonderful explanation and what I understood from what you said is that there was a process of incremental co-enrichment that if you like the people found a place that seemed a good place to live but then the way that they lived and the way that they recycled everything actually enriched the place and gradually over time the settlement process and the enrichment of the soil starts to create a path that confirms that the land has chosen the people and the people have chosen the land in a certain way and they’re enriching each other. Is that right?

Eduardo Góes Neves

Totally, yeah, that’s exactly so. That’s why there’s such a beautiful story. Because it tells us that there should be no contradiction between living in tropical settings. Actually, you know, there are ways of living in places such as the Amazon that actually bring some kind of enhancement to the natural conditions of the environment. It takes me back to the beginning of my talk, I mean, the idea of the DNA of the ancient city is being open to nature. It’s interesting, Professor Clark, because I have colleagues, agronomists who have tried to replicate the anthropic soils, large scale experimental stations, they’re using lots of manure, chicken manure, adding to the soil in industrial scales to try to improve soil fertility. It’s interesting because in the first couple of years, one would see that there’ll be an increase in fertility, but after a while, all the nutrients will be washed away. Because there was another logic, in a way, a logic that imposes some kind of a technocratic order onto nature that brings interesting results in the short term. When we render those places, it really like goes against the whole principles that led people to start those experiences in the first place. So we can say, I think that there was a kind of different ontology associated to the way that nature was modified and those soils were produced in the past. It’s a dialectical process, and that’s why it’s so wonderful, I think, as you described it so well.

Greg Clark

Yeah, and your work has revealed something that is startling but also inspiring to understand this umbilical relationship between the people and the land and how they feed and fertilise each other. Wonderful. Now, you were answering the question, where do we see the ancient Amazon Cities in the modern Amazon? And you gave one answer and you said there’s more. So, what else did you want to say?

Eduardo Góes Neves

I mean, we have a much better knowledge but we still have to learn a lot. There are virtually, you know, huge river basins in the Amazon that have never been studied archaeologically. So, I mean, we still have to learn a lot. There’s no question about that. But what we know today, tell us that there was an interesting range of different forms of urbanism in the Amazonian past. If you go back, for instance, if you look around in the Ecuadorian Amazon near the Andes in the Upano Valley of Ecuador, there was a wonderful article published, I think last year or a few years ago. People were using LiDAR, which is like this high-tech technology to map features under the forest canopy. Stéphen Rostain, a French archaeologist from the Senehès in France, he was able to show a large concentration of artificial mounds and structures connected by roads. There were like drain fields for agriculture near the settlements. He put an interesting map on this article where he compared Tehuacán, which was probably the largest city in the New World in the Mexico Valley. He compared the main axis of Tehuacán and it’s the same size of one of the sites that he was mapping there in Ecuador. Of course, there were many more people in Tehuacán. I mean, ancient Amazonian urbanism was low density. I mean, some of those sites were large, but because the sites were immersed into the forest or the secondary forest, although their area looked large I think it’s safe to say that the population density was much smaller in a place like this in Ecuador than for instance in Tehuacán in the Valley of Mexico. So that’s in Ecuador starting around 2,700 years ago.

If you move towards Bolivia, it’s an interesting area, the Llanos and Morros area of Bolivia, which is a transitional area between a periodically flooded savanna to the south and the tropical rainforest to the north. That’s also part of the Amazon Basin. My colleagues, Carla Jaimes from Bonn University, Germany, and Heiko Prümers from the German Archaeological Institute, they have mapped the pyramids. Loma Kotoka, it’s a site, it’s a monumental site. It’s an earthen pyramid measuring 22 metres high, like equivalent of a seven storey high building associated with causeways and drainage canals and roads and other smaller pyramids as well.

A bit later, already in the first millennium of the common area, around the same time further to the east here in Brazil, my friend Mike Heckenberger that I mentioned beforehand has mapped this wonderful network of large sites associated with ditches, dark soils and roads, what they call the galactic policies in the Southern Amazon and Rim in the Xingu Valley around 1,000 years ago.

In the Central Amazon where I’ve worked, we have this large dark soil sites, very deep, associated to mounds as well. In the mouth of the Amazon, Milagro Islands, artificial mounds, beautiful pottery, all dated to the first millennium Common Era as well. So I mean, if we were able to fly back in time to the Amazon 1,500 years ago, we would have seen a very large diversity of forms of urbanism associated with different kinds of potteries and ceramics as well.

The important keyword in that is diversity, under the general umbrella of the idea of, you know, ancient tropical urbanism, there was a very large range of different arrangements that are being reviewed by archaeological research.

Greg Clark

I was going to ask you about how many different kinds of Amazon Cities we find in the ancient Amazon, but I think you already started to answer that. If there’s anything else to say please say so now. Is there anything you’d like to add about the variety of different kinds of settlements or cities or towns? Were some of them productive centres, others religious centres? Did they play different roles? How do you see the ancient network of Amazon settlements?

Eduardo Góes Neves

That’s interesting as well. I mean, in some places clearly, for instance, there’s large sites in Bolivia. We’re talking about really dozens of earthworks, hundreds maybe around the city of Trinidad in the Bolivian Amazon. We believe that some of the taller pyramids were ceremonial centres because they were placed in the middle of a ring of smaller artificial mounds as well. We’ve seen some of the mapping data that we produce in this area. But some of them like their platforms, built-in platforms with a flat top, smaller ones surrounding a central mound, which was much taller. Again, my colleague, Carla Jaimes and Heiko Prümers, they’ve excavated some of those other larger mound sites like this, and they found cemeteries on the top of the higher mound. So maybe some of those places were religious and ceremonial places.

In other areas, one of the places where I’ve been working lately, it’s in the state of Acre, which is in the southwestern Amazon Basin here in Brazil near the border with Bolivia as well, but further north from the places that I just mentioned beforehand. In that case, it’s a totally different scenario because this place, it’s covered by forest and unfortunately, some of these areas have been destroyed today by soybean farming and cattle ranching. But in Acre, the sites are not very large. Some of them are like artificial geometric ditches, like squares and circles. Some of them are like green sites with mounds around central plazas. I mean, they’re not particularly very large sites. But what’s interesting is that we see a road network connecting those sites and we’re trying to map them. It’s kind of an endless network. We’re using LiDAR to map the connectivity between those places and it keeps on going. Anyway, we’re going to try to map these things further north towards the main channel of the Amazon and we keep on finding sites connected by roads.

That’s an interesting conceptual question in a way. The sites themselves, they’re not very large in this case. They are villages, we may use this expression. But if we look up and consider the whole network of villages connected by the roads, we realise that it doesn’t really help to treat them. If we treat them in an isolated fashion, we’re never going to understand the level of articulation of those settlements. And that’s why we talk about urbanism. We see at some of those sites in Acre, they’ve been occupied and reoccupied, you know, several times. So we can think about the landscape being created by people, who are managing the forest around those places, promoting changes in the forest in a permanent way that modifies the initial biological constitution of the forest. So, I mean, that’s why I think we can use maybe, you know, we stretch it in a case like that, but I think it’s valid to use or to test the validity of talking about urbanism in a case like that. Because the study of the isolated settlement doesn’t really help us to understand the dynamics, the social dynamics of the past in these areas.

Greg Clark

It’s such an interesting observation, Eduardo, because of course the same thing now occurs to urbanists today, that it doesn’t make sense to look at any city in isolation. You have to look at the relationships and the network. Now, in a moment I want to go on, if I may, to ask you a little bit about climate and geography and how you interpret that. And then I’d like to come back to this issue of, you know, human modification of the rainforest.

Fernanda Balbino

I actually do have a question. I’ve seen many talks by Eduardo and it’s always fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge. And in some of your talks, you talked about how we could see the forest as infrastructure. And I think it’s really connected to what you’ve been talking about here. But if you could just make it more explicit for us, like what is this connection? And sometimes you also did the analogy of like, the forest as the way we see the pyramids in Egypt. So if you share a little bit of this for us, I think it’d be really interesting for the listeners.

Eduardo Góes Neves

Thank you, Fernanda. Yes. I mean, the idea of the forest as infrastructure is a way to try to bring a historical dimension of what we can think of as forest making. We used to think here in the New World, I think in the Americas, there’s this idea that there was nature, I think the Amazon represents this maybe better than anywhere else here in the Americas. 'Pure nature' – very few people live in there, very sparse human settlements. In a way, that image was produced by the first scientists that travelled in the Amazon in the late 18th and early 19th Century. The region was hit, as anywhere else here in the Americas, really hard by the first 200 or 300 years of European colonisation. So we know that the spread of infectious diseases was very hard upon Indigenous populations for the first 100, 200 years of European settlements in the New World and overall really brought a very large impact.

In the case of the Amazon because there’s no masonry, the whole architecture, traditional architecture is based on soil like mound building or ditches or canals, and also wood and thatch. Once these places are abandoned, the forest covers them. It was very hard for those early scientists to see. I’ll go back to the dark soils. They’ll be seeing the dark soils, but they’ll be wondering whether these things were natural or not. I think the major change in perspective that archaeology has brought to these discussions to show the list of this. We have evidence of the dark soils. We have evidence of mount building, roads. I mean, my former professor William Balée, who’s an anthropologist who teaches at Tulane University in the US and who’s been a wonderful scholar. I’ve learned so much with him. Back in 1991, if I’m not mistaken, he suggested already that around 11% of the upper land forest of the Amazon were produced by Indigenous people in the past, by forest management. I think this number, I mean, we have to do this calculation again. We didn’t know as much as we know now about the past back in 1991. I think this number, which is an important starting number, is probably conservative. There’ll be more evidence that Indigenous people have created the forest that we know today. Just to be more precise, for instance, if you look at the distribution of tree species in the Amazon, there are like around 16,000 tree species in the Amazon, but there’s a very small number, around 1.5% or 1.4% of those 16,000 species, which is 227 species, a very, small amount that account for almost half of the trees in the Amazon. So there’s lots of species, there’s lots of trees, almost like 400 billion trees in the Amazon. But only 227 of those species account for almost half of all the trees. If you look at which is the most common tree in the Amazon is the açaí palma, which is a palm that is a health food supplement. Here in Brazil, people are crazy about it. In the US, I think California and other places, people love açaí. I bet Fernanda has açaí. She probably buys like, you know, in store in Washington, D.C.

So I mean, if you look at the roster of 227 most common tree species in the Amazon, you’re going to find cacao, you’re going to find the rubber tree, several different palm trees, which are economically or symbolically useful for traditional peoples. To me, that’s also another strong evidence that shows that the forests that we know today results, at least partially, from the selection and the management of those tree species in the past.

Just to finish because I think this question is important because it bears contemporary public policies for the Amazon. Because if you want to look to the forest and say, 'there’s no history there, it’s just nature', people feel entitled to promote things that we know they don’t work. They’re based on this idea of blank, no previous coevolution between people and the forest. But if you demonstrate that, 'listen, there’s a very long history, a coevolution between the people and the forest', I think that can really change the development of public policies. That’s why I think it’s important to clarify.

My last point has to do with the fact that the Amazon was a centre for what we call agrobiodiversity. I mean, we have the trees which been manipulated, managed by people in the past. We have other plants, shrubs, like the manioc, like peanuts, cacao, which is a tree, which is also hyper dominant. If you look at those, around 170 plants which are consumed throughout the world today were first cultivated in the Amazon by Indigenous people. So the Amazon is a cradle also of agrobiodiversity. I think there’s another example of this idea of the Amazon, the forest as infrastructure. There’s a very deep record all over the place of this ancient human presence. You can see it in the archaeological sites, but you can see that in the landscapes as well. That’s why I like so much to be an archaeologist because I think we can help to bring these things to the general public and conceive of a better way to live in those places.

Greg Clark

Eduardo, thank you. What a brilliant answer. And I’m going to summarise something I think you just said to check that it’s correct. So you said, I think, that there has been a long-running myth that somehow the Amazon is just a pristine rainforest of nature that has for thousands of years been uninhabited and that you view that this myth is most likely a consequence of some depopulation that occurred during the colonial period when Portuguese and Spanish colonialists had the effect of causing widespread death of many of the people who lived there. But in fact, as an archaeologist and as a scientist of the history of place, when you look at the Amazon in any level of detail, you discover all of the evidence that is required for several thousands of years of continuous settlement. And if it had not been for that colonial moment, this would have been more visible and more obvious to everyone. Did I get that about right?

Eduardo Góes Neves

You’re totally right, Greg. It’s interesting that you mentioned the word myth because one of the most important books written about the Amazon past, it was published in 1971 by a North American archaeologist called Betty Meggers. She was just very influential until today in Amazonian research. She didn’t believe that there were many people living in the Amazon in the past. And the title of the book is Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise.

Greg Clark

Wow.

Eduardo Góes Neves

I mean, I respect her a lot, although I don’t agree with her ideas she was really solicitive: 'there are too many environmental limitations for people to live in the Amazon.' Although she was an archaeologist, she really failed to see the archaeological evidence in this different way. She also failed to understand the devastating impact that the colonisation had of Indigenous people.

Greg Clark

I just want to ask you to say anything more you want to say about the geological and climatic conditions in which all of this history has occurred. Because you described brilliantly the situation in Bolivia or the situation in the mouth of the river or in the central river area. And of course there’s the relationship between the Amazonia and the Andes and the climatic relationships of the water, of the snow and the river. What is important to you as an archaeologist when you look at the geological and climatic features of this place?

Eduardo Góes Neves

I mean, it’s interesting because if you look from a purely spatial perspective, I mean, we call it the Amazon, but there’s so much geographical diversity in the Amazon. The Amazon in Bolivia or in Peru or in Ecuador, it’s very different from the Amazon in the mouth of, in or near the Atlantic Ocean. Because it’s so many different factors also have an important role in shaping this dynamic places. So obviously, you know, the closer one gets to the Andes, the stronger the influence is from all the soils brought by the meltwater, the glaciers coming from the annual rains in those areas. If you travel to the mouth of the Amazon, the influence of the tides are very strong. And there’s a project now, there’s this idea that people have found oil at the mouth of the Amazon. That’s a very polemic topic here in Brazil right now, but I mean, it’s very complicated to think about drilling in places where the tide varies so much. The Amazon drops 200,000 cubic metres of water by second in the Atlantic Ocean. It’s one-fifth of all the above ground fresh water in the world runs through the mouth of the Amazon. So you have a very strong tide coming from the Atlantic and that’s a very difficult place to travel. Trying to drill for oil there should be really complicated.

But I mean, there’s lots of geographical and geological variability. The rivers of the Amazon are very different, depending on where the catchment areas are, you have totally different kinds of rivers. The Amazon is what we call a white water river because it comes from the Andes. The Andes are a recent geological formation. It brings lots of nutrients. These white water rivers, they team with life. All the rivers like the Xingu, the Tapajós and the Tocantins are what we call the clear water rivers. They come from catchment areas which are much older, geologically speaking, so they don’t have as many nutrients than the Amazon. Then we have the Negro River, the Rio Negro, which is probably the most beautiful river in the Amazon. But the headwaters of the Rio Negro are in areas with very, very poor soils, sandy, well-drained soils in the Guyana Plateau. As a consequence, you have this beautiful dark colour of the water. So I mean, there are at least three different kinds of rivers that we find in the Amazon and it’s a reflection of the different geological settings of the catchment areas of those rivers.

If you look back at the archaeological record, we are also beginning to realise that there was climatic change happening in the Amazon as well. That probably between 8,000 and 4,000 years ago, the Amazon was a bit drier than it is today and probably the forest at that time was a bit smaller than it also is today. There was some climatic change happening starting around 4,000 years ago that promoted the expansion of the forest. I know this, I mean, we have the peri-ecological data, but we are excavating a site, a shell mound in this place in southwestern Amazon. If you look at the record of the sites, before 4,000 years ago people were eating fishes that liked to live in open-flooded savannahs. Starting around 4,000 years ago, the diet really changed, and they began to eat fishes that live in the areas of flooded forest. So we have interesting period. My colleague Gabriella Carniero from the French Museum of Natural History, she’s the one who did the photo analysis and her work is really excellent. So we have archaeological data that actually matched the period's ecological data. So there’s been variability. There is variability space-wise, but also there was human interference, of course, but also natural causes operating up on the landscapes of the Amazon throughout the millennia.

Greg Clark

Eduardo, thank you so much. I’ve got two more questions and then I’m coming back to Fernanda for any more questions from her. So, we’ve already talked about one of the big myths of the Amazon. This is the myth that the Amazon, Amazonia was not populated before the colonial period, and of course you’ve shown us why that’s not true. What are the other myths about the Amazon that we need to debunk or to throw a light on? Are there other myths?

Eduardo Góes Neves

Yeah, there is. There’s a myth which is very, very dangerous in my opinion, which is the notion that the Amazon is there to be developed from the outside. That people here in São Paulo or in Brasília or elsewhere in the world are going to come. Non-Amazonians using this different logic, different ontology to live in the world, are going to come with some kind of miraculous idea that’s going to solve all the supposed problems that the Amazon has. If you look back, I mean, it’s an interesting thing, Greg, because I’ve been working in the Amazon. The first time I went to the Amazon, I was an undergraduate in college and I was already studying archaeology. So it’s almost 40 years now. 1986 was the first time that I actually did archaeological field work in the Amazon. It’s interesting, it’s a euphemism, it’s kind of sad actually. We see this contradiction because we know so much more about the past, which is wonderful in one hand. But also in the last 40 years, 20% of the forest cover was lost only in the Brazilian Amazon. If you look at the whole Amazon, it’s 10%. So we know more and more about the past. But in my generation of archaeologists, we’ve been witnessing a process of destruction, which is really terrible. This destruction is based on the idea that the Amazon is open for “development” – cattle ranching, soybean farming, huge hydroelectric dams, road opening. That’s the legal part of that. Then there’s illegal mining, illegal logging as well. And I mean, that’s a terrible myth because we know, I mean, we have data, scientific data that shows this way of trying to establish living in the Amazon, very few people benefit from it. It’s tragic for the people who live there, but also tragic for the people who came from the outside. And we see this happening in this kind of a boom frontier towns that we see spread across the Amazon. So I think that myth is a dangerous myth. It needs to be debunked.

I hope that through archaeology, by bringing this deeper historical dimension we can at least add to a conceptual framework that can maybe help policymakers to conceive of other ways in terms of money, funding for economic initiatives that could be more interesting to conceive a better future for the Amazon and for the planet. Because we see the effects of the destruction of the Amazon. We feel here in 3,000 kilometres away in São Paulo, we’re feeling them. It's very dry. The winter is getting drier and drier, and the rainy season is getting stronger and stronger. The climate is definitely changing. Scientific data tells us it’s happening because of the deforestation and destruction of the Amazon. So that means it’s a myth that we have to debunk. That’s something I’m trying hard to do because I think it’s important to bring people a different perspective of what it is, what the Amazon is, if I may say this in this way.

Greg Clark

Well, and we support you and we salute you, Eduardo. That’s very important. And indeed, you’ve already started to answer my final question, which was, you know, it’s a difficult thing to ask a brilliant archaeologist, what should we do about the present and the future? But it would be a mistake not to ask you that question. So what does the long lessons of archaeology and all the evidence you’ve been sharing with us, what does it point to in terms of what we need to do now and what we need to do in the future to support the Amazon and to support it in order to support human flourishing in the way it has done for so many thousands of years?

Eduardo Góes Neves

I think, mean, first thing, stop deforestation. It’s easy to say, hard to do. But I mean, I would say first thing, stop deforestation. Here in Brazil, to convert all public lands in the Amazon into protected areas, national parks, Indigenous lands. But I mean, just freeze everything which is there, which is public. There’s no private owner to convert those in protected territories, that will be the second thing to do. The third thing to do, I think, is to be humble and to talk with Indigenous people. I mean, I’m an archaeologist. I can tell people what I’ve learned through the archaeology. But if we just talk and listen and read what Indigenous people have been telling us towards how to live in a place such as the Amazon, I think we have a lot to learn from that. I mean, all this crazy development – the huge dams such as Belo Monte, the big dams in the Madeira River, they don’t even produce energy. They’re like 10 years old. They’re not even that old and they’re already obsolete. So, I mean, these things don’t really work. You know, thinking about agencies like the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, it’s important to think about the kind of money that can be allocated.

As a scientist, what I’ve been trying to do is actually, and that’s why I thank you for this invitation, is to try to talk away from the normal people that I talk with in academia. I think scientific communication is something which is very, very important. Before I used to think, I do my research and then, communication is something that comes out after the research is done. Today I’m trying to change my priorities in a way. I’m still a scientist, I do the field work and work in the lab here in the museum where I work, but also, I think communication is, to me, it became maybe something even more important to talk about what we do. Because I think, I have no illusion that’s going to change the people’s mind at once, but it’s something that I have to do all the time.

It’s funny, Greg and Fernanda, but I’ve learned the importance of redundancy. Because sometimes we’re talking and we’re repeating the same things time and again. I used to feel bad about that. They say, I’ve been saying the same things, but we talk, we always talking today to different constituencies. There’s always something new to say. So I think to be redundant in an interesting way in communication, it’s something that I’ve been trying to strive to learn to do it more effectively. So that’s the way I see it. Things that can be done, they should be done. That’s how I see myself in this process.

Greg Clark

Eduardo, thank you so much. We’re so glad that you are speaking out and you are repeating and making clear what the archaeological science is telling us. And I’m so grateful to you for your years of study and also your discussion today. I want to see if Fernanda has any more questions for you.

Fernanda Balbino

Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Eduardo. think we’re definitely sharing the same purpose of valuing the human settlements in the Amazon for the conservation. My question, and it will be a quick one, is like thinking about the sustainability and resilience that we want to promote for Amazon Cities, what can we learn from elsewhere, and what does the Amazon has to teach for the rest of the world, in your opinion?

Eduardo Góes Neves

That’s a difficult question. I had a laboratory in Manaus for many years. I travel very often to Manaus. I love those places. But I mean, I live in São Paulo, which is no example, you know, of urbanism. I love São Paulo as well, but I’m just talking here at the floodplains of a river that was destroyed, like the Pinheiros River for people who are familiar. So I’m not speaking from a superior point of view, but I mean, for instance, Manaus, which is a city that I know very well. I go very often to Manaus. Manaus is a city that’s almost 2 million people. There’s a big discussion now, there’s a road that people want to reopen because Manaus is not connected to the rest of the country of Brazil. So it’s probably the largest city in the world that’s isolated from any other larger settlement. You can go to Venezuela from Manaus, but you can never travel from Manaus to Brasília, for instance, which is the capital of Brazil.

So I mean, that’s a serious question. More than 2 million people isolated from the rest of the country. I mean, I won’t be talking about the world necessarily at this moment. I think it’s a very complicated project. But I mean, Manaus is at the junction of two of the largest rivers in the world, the Rio Negro and the Amazon River, which is called Solimões. The Negro and the Solimões meet and they form the Amazon near Manaus. But there’s a systematic lack of water in Manaus. It’s crazy that you live close to the two largest rivers in the world and lots of people who live in the city have no access to water. If you look at the creeks of Manaus most of them are polluted. It’s interesting because it's contemporary urban, but on the other hand, Manaus is a fascinating city, very dynamic. You know, there’s so many things happening that if you go to the outskirts of Manaus, you see Indigenous people making their gardens using the plants that they brought from their villages upstream, far away. So it’s a fascinating place. But I mean, there’s some serious problems that Amazonian contemporary cities should have to face in order to become better places for people to live.

I mean, I think if the past can help us in any way to bring some kind of guidance for the future. It’s like you try to recycle of idea of the garden cities. Just basically bringing the forest back. Let the forest get into the cities. And it happens in Manaus because in the cracks, literally in the cracks. Manaus is fascinating. You see like there’s a recent urban invasion of an empty lot and then you go back five years later, there many trees already growing there. It’s almost impossible to control nature there.

I’m not an urbanist, of course, but I would think about ways that would help preserving the water bodies, the creeks, the small rivers that run through the cities, cleaning them up, planting trees along the riverbanks. No, just let the forest in again. It shouldn’t be that complicated to do things this way because there’s this very strong force of nature, which is already literally at the doorsteps. I think the basic lesson is like, just open the door and let the forest back. I think that that could be an interesting way to conceive of a better future for the contemporary citizens of the Amazon.