by Jill Burdigala » Wed Sep 27, 2006 1:39 am
I used to be quite interested in the history of Precolumbian Latin America, and of course any educated person knows of the sophisticated cultures developed in Mexico, Central America, and Peru. But I had never read of anything happening in Brazil. Maybe that's because all of my books were ancient tomes dating from the 1950s and 60s, I don't know. <br><br>Anyway, a year or so ago I saw a show on the History Channel, or A&E, or some such, which among other things briefly mentioned that at some time in the recent past -- the 80s or 90s, I can't recall -- somebody, an archaeologist or whomever (I wish my memory were better) was flying over some Amazonian swamps in a small plane and recognized that he was looking down at the traces of an ancient agricultural mechanism that would have fed a population of 50,000 people or more.<br><br>Now, perhaps this all turned out to be bunk in the long run -- I've never heard anything more about it, but then again I don't follow this thing too closely any more, but at the same time I know some of these schlocky TV history shows are not the most rigorous in their scholarship. Anyway, it was both thrilling and profoundly disturbing to me at the time to think of the possibilty that a populous, highly advanced civilization may have flourished in the Amazon before the Spanish came and <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>right down to the present day no one had had a clue that it had ever existed.</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END--><br><br>I don't think there's any doubt that the old folks had a whole lot more going on than most rigorous academics today would deem it worth their doctorate to speculate upon. Just imagine if a catastrophe wiped out the whole western world tomorrow, how accurately do you think someone living 500 years from now could reconstruct life in the present day Philadelphia from whatever detritus he happened to excavate?<br> <p></p><i></i>
