Ancient City Found in the Amazon
bbc.com
bbc.com
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-urban-complex-ec...
We are also well aware about ancient settlements in America, especially in the Amazon area.
That a professor with an European name doesn't know much about this is his own personal problem but him peddling this false information and BBC going along with this creates a larger issue.
Ref also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_City_of_Z for more info about Col. Fawcett and this story.
David Grann is a well known New Yorker contributor and, before the book, has also written an article named "Lost City of Z": https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/19/the-lost-city-...
2003 - Lost cities of the Amazon revealed: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna3077413
2008 - Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost-amazon-citie...
2019 - Long lost cities in the Amazon were once home to millions of people: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132130-300-long-los...
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_First_Voyage_Round_the_Wo...
The journalistic style at the BBC is to push an outdated colonization narrative onto everything, and I am also quite tired by it.
The BBC article is on city structures that date to a full thousand years earlier.
If had been written, Pigafetta's Account of Magellan's Ship fitting and Departure wouldn't neccesarily shed light on the state of civilization in Portugal in 500 BCE.
Had the sentence read more like "some academics have a Eurocentric view of civilization", I would probably take that argument at its face. But nowadays, with improvements in education and the vast quantity of good information available to anyone on the Internet, telling your readers that "we are Eurocentric in our view of culture and civilization" is tantamount to calling them ignorant.
> five centuries ago, people were capable of making fascinating discoveries and simply stating [their perceived] objective truth about what they found.
As I hope we can agree, Pigafetta with the best intentions in the "New World" was hardly capable of objectively writing anything other than his own perception .. that whole "New World" thing itself is a bit of a tell about contemporary writings on what for the subjects was the same old same old Old World they'd been living in for thousands of years.
> telling your readers that "we are Eurocentric in our view of culture and civilization" is tantamount to calling them ignorant.
The context for that is the BBC directly quoting Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.
That is absolutely (I would hope) what the Prof said and it gives his opinion on the bulk of his European peers and mentors in studies of ancient civilisation.
It's certainly the case that there are some acedemics who are not Eurocentric in outlook, a large number of those are out in front and in the public eye thanks to what some call "woke politics invading everywhere" but it's entirely possible there is still a dark mass of rarely popularised eurocentric professors of gravitas that create a well others are vocal about escaping from.
As for the general state of academia, I would opine that modern scholarship’s “dark mass” is rooted in postmodernism, and the most successful way to operate as a modern academic is to present all evidence from a racial/colonial perspective. Although your guess is as good as mine, as is the BBC’s, since people also need to contend with the potential Internet backlash from presenting their views nowadays.
> While we knew about cities in the highlands of South America, like Machu Picchu in Peru, it was believed that people only lived nomadically or in tiny settlements in the Amazon.
Machu Picchu was built in the ~1400s, not long before Magellan's voyage. Bringing that in as the example of the cities we knew about is clearly trying to communicate that we didn't believe in pre-Columbian cities in the Amazon, which is completely false. One example among many:
https://news.mongabay.com/2005/10/pre-columbian-amazon-suppo...
Which part of the article you linked supports the notion of large well established pre Columbian cities being a generally accepted notion prior to 2000? Indeed which part of that article supports large pre Columbian cities?
Note: I do not dispute such things in the slightest, it's just that your 2005 article strongly supports the notion that until recently there were:
long-held views that the region was sparsely populated by tribal groups who peacefully coexisted with the apparently hostile environment that surrounded them.
That supports large dispersed agrian populations but doesn't go so far as large concentrated urban areas which seems to be what the primary BBC article is attributing to the Prof. in question here.
In the arc of academic studies these are all "recent" changes in the traditional scholastic views .. although admittedly they perhaps originated a little before your own birth?
I'd started putting together a reply, but this turned me off. I'll just leave a note saying that this is ineffective discourse and you might want to reconsider your approach in the future.
The article should omit this statement.
I'll never understand the zeal some people have for self-flagellating or being overly PC.
What is this supposed to mean? Why are you suggesting that the average "software developer" would view the subject's expressed point of view as "woke" as opposed to a person from any other occupation? Why the hostility towards software developers?
I am not sure what is meant by "board popular", did you mean to say "broadly popular". At any rate, you have not answered my question. You have simply rephrased what the poster that I responded to above already said.
Then, David, I‘m not sure where you are from and perhaps in your country what you call „software developers“ (a term which seems to conveniently exclude yourself, guessing from your username) are _usually_ uneducated people living under a rock, but let me inform you that where I am from this is not the case and many have a wide range of interests and are certainly as qualified as anyone else to have an opinion on what is not a subtle detail of archaeology research but a topic of general interest that happens to be closely connected to politics.
So the original comment raised a valid point, worth discussing.
I will grant that (unlike the drive-by culture warring against "being overly PC", the BBC and climate change by other people demonstrating the breadth of their interests elsewhere in the thread) the OP does actually give us something relevant to discuss: the "lost city" in the Xinguano region still occupied by the descendants of the few survivors of contact with Europeans has been "discovered" multiple times during the 20 year period between Rostain's first study of the Upano region and his LiDar survey (Xinguano was covered the exactly same way; just like the trope of changing agriculture-centric views comes up every time Göbekli Tepe or similarly early structures are discussed... without triggering HN). I guess you could stretch those recent discoveries to arguing that there's absolutely no research bias towards Europe and nobody ever conflated the Conquistadors' failure to find cities full of gold in the Amazon Basin with there being no ancient history to find, and it'd be relatively easy to defend the Meggers hypothesis about the unsuitability of the Amazon for major city building by insisting it wasn't Eurocentric, it was just wrong. But nobody seems interested in anything wider than getting angry at the idea Eurocentrism has ever been a thing...
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/8/lewis-reaping-wh...
Shame, a discussion on the Meggers hypothesis might have actually been interesting, but if you have nothing to offer but distinctly third rate culture war arguments then so be it.
> Prof Rostain says he was warned against this research at the start of his career because scientists believed no ancient groups had lived in the Amazon.
> "But I'm very stubborn, so I did it anyway. Now I must admit I am quite happy to have made such a big discovery," he says.
The article is fine.
Ironic parts italicized.
He later says that nobody believed in his research. Weird that they made him director of the national center for scientific research with all those crazy, unorthodox ideas nobody agrees with.
Archaeology / Anthropology have a very fraught relationship with science and reason, sadly.
One subset of those outcomes, is that conditions would arise such that plant development is accelerated, something like a junglification (my word, probably butchering it).
Here's an article related to this, that links to research: https://cordis.europa.eu/article/id/430230-accelerated-rates...
The roots of Eurocentrism can be traced back to ideologies like white supremacy, which historically asserted the superiority of white Europeans over other races. This belief in racial hierarchy, unfortunately, influenced various scientific and cultural fields, including the interpretation of archaeological findings. For instance, the concept of phrenology, now discredited, was once used to claim inherent intellectual and moral superiority of certain races over others, particularly to justify the superiority of whites over other races.
It's crucial to understand that human civilization has a rich and diverse origin, much of which began in regions outside of Europe. The earliest known civilizations and significant cultural developments originated in various parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The reluctance to acknowledge the contributions and advancements of non-European civilizations often stems from a reluctance to challenge the long-standing narrative of white supremacy.
> Archaeology has historically assumed that European civilization was more significant and advanced than others, a view possibly rooted in ethnocentrism and racism, but findings like these challenge that assumption.
Please just say what you want to say without pasting a bunch of fluff from a chat bot.
It amounts to this decade's version of talking in a robotic monotone.
The truth is that classical archaeology is often just easier, because we have a lot of writing from that time period telling us where battles happened etc.
I’m sure archaeologist would love to open up a whole new front, but it takes time to find stuff that’s hard to find.
Most of the "foundations of western civilisation" is not actually european and that's a well known and accepted fact. Yes, greeks and romans sure, but where did the greeks take the alphabet? It's not controversial, everybody knows that europeans didn't invent writing nor civilization.
It's also unsurprising that the first ancient civilizations to have been discovered by europeans were a) closer to europe (at least in the same continent) and b) not covered by jungle.
If there are people in Europe who are ignorant of that, well that's unfortunate. But the world won't become a better place if all we do is to shame those people with self-flagellatory insinuations that they should re-think their place in the world or whatever. That doesn't work. The natural tendency of people who are looked down upon is to react and entrench themselves even deeper in their positions.
I'd vastly prefer if we just teach to marvel at the beauty of our world and hopefully people who are willing to open up their minds will be attracted to the diversity and depth of our collective human experience and become less and less parochial.
Do you _actually_ feel shamed by the researcher, or by reading the researcher's opinion? Why feel shame over something you think is wrong? There were no admonishments or moral proclamations -- from whence cometh your shame?
Also, there's some irony that you say "if all we do is shame people..." --- Don't lump me in with you! Isn't that your problem with the quote to begin with?
I personally know people who do feel that kind of rhetoric to be a personal attack on their tribe. I don't personally belong to that tribe or even like that tribe but it exists and they're being energized by all those attacks. I like liberal values and I'm saddened by the rise of reactionaries. If I want to protect liberal values I know that being a jerk against conservatives is counterproductive. I don't care if it feels good, it's not effective.
EDIT: I don't think the researcher or the journalist or you or anybody in particular is at fault here; we all react to the incentives around us. My dig is against the pattern and the perverse incentives that are creating this environment in the first place.
1) Western europeans are probably the people least in need of that reminder. They’re probably the least ethnocentric culture in the world, having voluntarily adopted a Mediterranean civil society (from the Romans) and Middle Eastern religion. They’re NPCs in some of their own most important stories.
Maybe it’s different in Europe, but American kids spend inordinate amounts of time learning about other cultures (native Americans, Mesopotamians, Egyptians) and comparatively little time learning about their own. European history isn’t even a part of most American curricula.
2) Which cultures invented rockets and sent people to space?
It seems to me that none of the time students spend on subjects like Mesoamerican History are "inordinate", since students take history for a fixed, small number of semesters. You can definitely ordinate the time here.
I was born in India, and the best resources I have to learn about the history of my ancestors were written by German anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work. The most biased historical perspectives, interestingly enough, seem to come from Indian scholarship - usually by claiming the authors of the Vedas knew everything there is to know about science and the natural world.
The reason I take the time to even write a response here is because propagating a biased view of history can harm people. A vast majority of Indians believe that Ayurvedic remedies are more effective than modern medicine, and many pay for engaging in this widespread anti-colonial perspective with their lives.
Lots of explorers came up empty and the legends were thought to be hokum by supposed experts, so yeah, I don’t understand the narrative.
Not only that but neither the Chinese nor South Africans, etc., have a different take or narrative that’s more globocebtric. I mean, I don’t think even the natives of the Amazon today have a better understanding than European, American, Asian or African archeologists regarding any such ancient civilization.
It’s a really tired trope.
Silly little 800 word articles like this are easier to see them for what they are when printed on newspaper.
Here's how I read it:
The quotes are from two archaeologist/anthropologists who specialize in the Amazon and ancient Amazonian culture. They are extremely familiar with the general level of knowledge of their audience regarding their specialties.
> "This is older than any other site we know in the Amazon. We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation, but this shows we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation," says Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, who led the research.
> "It changes the way we see Amazonian cultures. Most people picture small groups, probably naked, living in huts and clearing land - this shows ancient people lived in complicated urban societies," says co-author Antoine Dorison.
The use of "we" is the polite way of saying "most people who will be reading this article".
It's not moralizing. It's pointing out that what most readers learned in school a few decades ago (and still believe) is incomplete, and we keep learning new extents of its incompleteness -- and the missing parts of the story make everything much more interesting.
They are excited by this and want to share. This paper is a pretty big deal, and they should be excited. I'd love to know as much about Amazonian civilizations, architectures, societies, etc as I do Aztec, Maya, and Inca.
1. An exhaustive understanding of the pyramids and secret chambers would be detrimental to the Egyptian mythos. Egypt owns the pyramids. Western Egyptologists need Egyptian cooperation to learn anything new.
2. Sand-filled wind behaves much like an abrasive liquid. There is more sand in the bottom of a sand-filled wind than in the top.
3. Rotation creates surprising perfection, especially when wielded by skilled artisans. It's rarely the tools that bring results.
Abrasive grit. You can make a saw out of a plank with grit -- the grit will eat the plank faster than stone, but it can cut through granite because quartz in the sand is harder than granite. Similarly, you can make a drill with a dowel and grit. The step from drill to lathe is pretty obvious to me.
And don't forget time. People with primitive technology have an astounding amount of patience compared to soft-handed technologists. Speaking as a soft-handed technologist, of course.
> We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation, but this shows we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation
Why do we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation? They found a city with buildings and roads. That's an entirely traditional Eurocentric definition of civilization.
The best part is when you look them up, it turns out the researcher who said this is European, from France.