Gaspar carvajal (the first person to describe the Amazon) describes large cities, political entities, and mass farming throughout the Amazon River. Historians mostly said they were exaggerations or outright lies. In light of new LiDAR findings, how serious should we take his claims?

764 points by UnderstandingThin40 a day ago on reddit | 51 comments

The idea that the Amazon was a pristine and largely uninhabited forest at the time of the Spsnish conquest has been thoroughly debunked and has not been the scientific consensus for two decades at least. Carvajal may have been exaggerating, as was the norm with these kinds of travel tales, but his descriptions most likely were somewhat accurate.

: porkbuttstuff | 18 hours ago
Exactly, exaggerated not fabricated.
: Thumperfootbig | 5 hours ago
I think even calling them exaggerated is a bit on the nose…he saw what he saw.

the_gubna | 21 hours ago

Many of the earthworks that LiDAR has uncovered have not been thoroughly ground truthed. In many of the ones that have been ground truthed (to some extent), the archaeological evidence indicates that they may have been abandoned before European contact.

Was there a higher population density during Carvajal’s voyage than some 20th century historians thought? Quite likely.

Do the earthworks revealed through LiDAR in the Amazon correspond with the settlement pattern at European contact? Quite possibly no.

Does this all need more research - absolutely.

bigvalen | 10 hours ago

I assumed that soil quality was low, so people would build a city, live well for a few decades from the surrounding land, and then slowly move on as agricultural output dropped. It'd explain why there are many ruins of cities, but few inhabited ones.

But that'd need research to date a few dozen of them to very different time periods, and doubt that'll ever get funding.

: Faerandriel | 8 hours ago
Terra Preta is the name of the technique they used to make the soil quality good. If you haven't yet, look it up. The parts of the amazon soil where humans did Terra Preta are still massively fertile even to this day.

Also, other parts (like Marajó island in Brazil) were more focused on water system controls for fishing and agriculture. Pretty advanced techniques too.

The Amazon gets underestimated a lot for how populated and advanced their people were. It's mostly because they didn't use stone for buildings, mostly biodegradable construction materials like wood. And once the old world diseases decimated the population, the wooden cities rotted back into the forest.
: [OP] UnderstandingThin40 | 2 hours ago
It’s actually the opposite ironically. The soil quality is so good, that it lasted generations. It actually lasted so long that various tribes apparently forgot how to make it, and by the time they ran out generations later they forgot the knowledge.

Towairatu | 20 hours ago

It is now widely accepted that, at least concerning cities in the Amazon, Carvajal didn't lie as much as we thought for 5 centuries. There have been numerous LiDAR findings of city ruins, including in the areas Carvajal says he's been through, some far older than his travel, others contemporary.

Terra preta (black earth) is also a strong indicator. It's a man-made type of fertile soil, mostly comprised of coal, pottery shards and various waste, on which agricultural yields are high to sustain such large population clusters. It's still used up to this very day, and is thought to cover somewhere between 0.3% (approx. 18 000km²) and 3.2% of the Amazonian forest.

: Masty1992 | 7 hours ago
Everyone seems to still feel the need to right the wrongs of the past by acknowledging the people of the Amazon had intelligent and sophisticated society, so that’s all most comments in this thread say, but once we accept that, is there any consensus on what level of society we’re talking about?

Has anyone legitimately theorised that there were population centres comparable to major Eurasian cities?

The Terra Preta agriculture argument is very interesting and sophisticated but do we know if they could really feed non agricultural urban people?

No answers just downvotes? I assume nobody knows then

Imaneight | 18 hours ago

I'm currently reading River of Darkness about the Orellana expedition adventure and they detail rowing as fast as they can through a section of the river with a very hostile tribe, and they are getting hammered from both sides of the river by the same tribe that has settlements continuously for 2 days sailing. I can imagine that's many hundred miles of river length that's populated.

They also describe an abandoned yucca plantation that Franscico Pizarro's original team came upon with rows of planted yucca that was 50 miles long along a tributary, likely the Coco.

geostupid | 12 hours ago

How is the book otherwise? Sounds like it might be a good read?

Imaneight | 12 hours ago

I'm 2/3rd through it now taking my time, slow reader apologies. Just skipping forward, the last third of it is all references, citations, indexes etc, with footnotes/ translations all along while reading, so it's legit. I'm a sucker for anything Indiana Jonesesque, and this expedition starts out with the promise of "El Dorado", Inca treasures, we all grew up knowing they were full of shit, but this one actually ends up with them building a boat to survive, friending natives, dodging natives, getting spit out in the Atlantic after mapping the Amazon, then they sailed back to Spain, Pizzaro be damned. I was hooked.

: elder_george | 18 minutes ago
> Indiana Jonesesque

There's a Soviet adventure novel "Grave of Tame Tung" which I wish was more known even within Russia. It surely isn't scientific, and the editors clearly put a bunch of propaganda (it was published after the author's suicide for political reasons), but otherwise it's impressive how much effort the author put into research (given he lived in a provincial Russian city).

The premise is, there was a mysterious white-skinned (sigh) tribe "Lacori" deep in the Amazonian selva, who use remains of weirdly advanced technology and whose ancient chief's grave allegedly contains treasures.

The chief arcs are a gang of bandits searching it, a group of archeologists trying to beat them at that, and a Russian guy (apparently brought to Brazil by the Nazis escaping Germany) who has to survive in the selva.

As a spoiler, it's revealed that the Lacori are the "lost city of Z" Fawcett sought (and he was killed by Rimmel to prevent pillaging it) and had contacts with an extraterrestrial civilization (whence their technology).

All in all, it's a bit cheesy (even without the cringy propaganda BS) and non-scientific, but I loved it as a kid.

starfish2686 | 13 hours ago

2 days float by river is not hundreds of miles.

Imaneight | 12 hours ago

Fair enough. Let's do the math. From Google: "Its current speed or flow velocity in the middle reaches generally ranges between 0.7 and 3 meters per second (1.5 to 6.7 miles per hour), depending on the specific channel shape and seasonal rains." So let's pick a middle speed 4 MPH Amazon river flow rate, just lazily drifting.

Let's also assume that you have 6 canoes of natives rowing their asses off trying to kill you at any time for 24 hours with bows and arrows with poison tipped arrows. So you're not just floating, you're also rowing hard. Let's just add 1 more MPH. 5 MPH for 2 days worth of travel for 48 hours equals 240 miles of distance, hence hundreds of miles in 2 days.

Do not underestimate the power of the Amazon, with the added bonus of death. You're here because you really love history. Check the book out at the library. It's a wild story.

recycled_ideas | 6 hours ago

> Let's also assume that you have 6 canoes of natives rowing their asses off trying to kill you at any time for 24 hours with bows and arrows with poison tipped arrows. So you're not just floating, you're also rowing hard. Let's just add 1 more MPH. 5 MPH for 2 days worth of travel for 48 hours equals 240 miles of distance, hence hundreds of miles in 2 days.

The number of people you would need to row continuously for 48 hours would require a boat bigger than you can row. No one is doing that because people need to sleep.
If natives who know the river are trying their hardest to kill you, you won't escape them by rowing and they can't row a canoe for 24 hours either because that's insane.

Realistically it's unlikely that a boat would even just drift with the current for 48 hours because travelling an unfamiliar river in the dark would be incredibly dangerous.

boofoodoo | a day ago

Isn’t this what was suggested at the end of the Lost City of Z? I’ve been wanting to read more about this.

Piglet6482 | 18 hours ago

I recommend the books 1491 and 1492.

Edit: correction, 1493 not 1492.

: Timid-Tlacuache | 17 hours ago
Seconding the recommendation. Important books.

technodaisy | 18 hours ago

Check this our Explorer Albert Lin and Lidar are best mates!

elpoco | 20 hours ago

Charles C. Mann published 1491 and 1493 popularizing this about twenty years ago, no? It’s my understanding that this is not exactly a groundbreaking theory, although there hasn’t been too much money spent on actual excavations.

: QuesoDog | 19 hours ago
A lot of that work was based on charcoal deposits located near river banks. That was work was done by Crystal McMichael and my sense is that those numbers were a fraction of what this new paper suggests.

MrMaxwellPower2 | 19 hours ago

Um Francisco de Orellana 1542 traveled the entire length of the Amazon. He described cities with millions of people.

: [OP] UnderstandingThin40 | 2 hours ago
Carvajal was part of orellanas crew, he’s the one that actually described them

Zestyclose-Food-7917 | 17 hours ago

I urge you to read the book “1491” by Charles C. Mann. He discusses what the Americas were actually like at the moment Columbus arrived and how and why they were made to appear much more primitive by the European explorers.

Yawarundi75 | 8 hours ago

That consensus has been largely overthrown. A simple but good source is 1491 by Charles C. Mann.

robexib | 8 hours ago

I don't think we think that the Amazon was ever truly uninhabited once people made it to South America. Hell, there's still uncontacted tribes there now.

Was there ever a civilisation on the scale of the Inca or Aztec in the Amazon? Now that, I find hard to believe. But smaller-scale villages and towns? Absolutely.

1 to 3 million people sounds huge, but so is the Amazon, and there's no reason to believe at this point that they were all politically, ethnically, or economically connected.

: [OP] UnderstandingThin40 | 2 hours ago
It’s estimated to be 1-3 million ppl in a very small part of the Amazon (like 10%) of it. Not the whole Amazon

Mr_Bankey | 7 hours ago

Here is a great documentary on the subject. TL;DW the answer is very seriously

Super901 | 21 hours ago

The man probably brought the diseases that wiped out those very cities he visited.

: Petrichordates | 21 hours ago
Not probably, and not just him. His expedition killed millions.

Borne2Run | 14 hours ago

The relevant question is: if the Amazon had large cities, political entities, and mass farming throughout the period; then why did the Incas not conquer the region or have records of trade with those peoples?

godlords | 8 hours ago

..The Andes? Andean civilization is "pristine", it developed independently for thousands of years. When you have successfully developed mass agriculture on the mountains, why go trudging through what appears to be an infinitely vast and dense jungle in search of civilizations to conquer that you have no idea exist?

The Inca empire only conquered the rest of the Andean civilizations a century before the spanish arrived. Machu Picchu was built in 1450. They had no written language, no form of money. Taxes were paid in labor.

: Borne2Run | 6 hours ago
There would be records through the qipu knots, pottery matching Amazonian sites, evidence of seeds from upriver/etc. There was plenty of intermediate trade and technological diffusion between the Andean and Mexico regions over centuries vice a direct trade route as in Mediterranean or Persian plateau routes.

[OP] UnderstandingThin40 | 2 hours ago

That’s like asking why didn’t the Chinese conquer India or vis versa lol. Because it was virtually impossible. Especially without horses

AlternativeRoyal6226 | 10 hours ago

Doesn't 'the Dawn of everything: a new history of humanity' by Graeber and Wengrow also touch on the subject that the Americas had large cities to rival and exceed the size of cities in what is considered the birth of civilization (the middel East, mesopotamia, etc.)?

SimaNishiki | 6 hours ago

Real question isn't about how traces of civilization were ridiculed and hidden for so long, but why Europe used and spread for centuries the systematic mcguffin of primitive people to help because only white europeans were civilized humans capable of agriculture and building stuff, while the rest of us were semi humans living in wild jungles with no knowledge.

Answer is easy, and it's how the US achieved old Europe's dream... Carvajal exaggerated a bit but not as much as people said. They couldn't let someone contradict and correct the narrative when they still had to colonize full continents.