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> they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases

I think it was much more than this. Remember Columbus landed in 1492 and these areas were very connected with trade networks, including from the Carribean islands to the mainlands. Diseases could have spread through most of both of the continents in a decade. And then places like what became the United States were not regularly seeing Europeans until ~1620, so the apocalyptic plague would have already had a 100 year head start. Places like the West Coast and interiors of the US or interior of South America would have been 200 years or more post-plague.

Also, many of the earliest explorers of the deep interior often described sophisticated and heavily populated societies. But when others eventually reached those areas to find them sparsely populated wilderness those stories were dismissed as just more legends and rumors of cities of gold. See Francisco de Orellana's description of his expedition down the Amazon for a good example of this.

> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention

The weather there is quite brutal. Roads need tons of maintenance to remain passable. This is one of the reasons rivers are such an important transportation network.

> Amazonian landscape management is so radically different from what Europeans know that they likely just didn't realize what was before their eyes

This is an interesting explanation. Also, refusing to document previous occupation is a convenient way to claim land rights.

To add to that, most of their structures in the Amazon would have undoubtedly been built by wood (plentiful) rather than stone (scarce).

Also, I think 30 years of a field being abandoned in the Amazon is likely more than enough for it to return fully to jungle. It's not like explorers were running around counting tree rings.

It's hard for temperate folks to appreciate just how incredibly agressive tropical vegetation growth can be. I'm only subtropical but I've got a tree that's about 6 years old and a foot in diameter. And that's after I've topped it at 5 ft(0 branches left, just a stump) every 6 months or so just to try to keep it under control. If I'd let it run rampant it would be at full growth now, around 50ft and 1.5ft across. I had another tree that went from 10 inch seedling to 10ft and bearing fruit in 9 months. A field abandoned for 30 years in the amazon is 100% jungle.

Actually, the vast majority of structures are earthen. Even the article states as much

Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.

>Europeans didn't really get to most of the more isolated inland areas in the Americas until the 1600s or well after that, though.

It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow. There's a reason that half of all towns in New England have the name "field" in them. The impenetrable thicket that characterizes unmaintained New England land would have been foreign to literally every human to ever set foot there prior to the mid 1700s (decades of re-growth after the natives had been mostly driven off but not long enough for complete cultivation by europeans).

Now, obviously that's not that far inland, but by the time you're talking about the french surveying the continental interior native populations had stabilized. The worst disease epidemics were very much at 1500s and early 1600s thing.

Amazon is different beast, humidity, insect fast growing plants. It is nasure on hyperdrive. I wouldn't be surprised if things took 5-10 times faster than england. Or any more dry european places.

Brasil has tried building a highway to Manaus like twice and each time the interior has eaten it. That's with relatively modern tools.

Yeah, i spend some time in south america and you can see that even in Rio. If people left the nature would just gulp it up. fun time sleeping in jungle in Iquitos, its crazy how dens the jungle can be

It takes more than a few decades for things to regrow.

Have you ever seen a cleared lot that hasn’t been touched for a decade? We have a few near my house, and it is fascinating how wild they have gotten in such a short time.

Multiplied 10x and set in the rainforest, I would expect signs of humanity to be completely hidden.

Is -field really that common? I live in old England and many towns here are called -field, although granted not as many as -ton/-don.

Not as common as old England but vastly more common than the rest of the country because the charters had to be petitioned for and approved by several layers of intolerable assholes so unoffensive descriptive names like <thing>field were preferred over just about everything else. See also North/South/East/West<thing that was previously approved>. Kind of like how modern corporate safe culture bland-washes everything.

They mostly gave all the waterways colloquial names based on the Indians and of course that got copy-pasta'd onto all sorts of charts and maps so the government couldn't redefine those even if they wanted to.

Most of the rest of the country (including the mid Atlantic despite being settled at the same time) was far more deliberately surveyed and named.

The population collapse in New England happened only a couple of years before the Plymouth colony was established though (they didn't have any meaningful contact with the Spanish colonies where it happened in the mid and early 1500s).

Of course probably it took quite a bit more for it to reach the Amazon but it's not like Europeans were that familiar or explore the region that much until the 1800s or so.

There wasn't a single civilization there. The same way if you arrived in Greece during the roman period you'd have 2000 year old temples to look at and if you go there now you have both the 4000 year old ones and the 2000 year old ones. In the amazon some of the stuff that is there was ancient already at the time of the Discoveries.

> There wasn't a single civilization there.

That's what I said. There have been multiple. The linked article is about the Aquiry civilization which numbered 3 million people in only 3% of the land. The Marajoara outlasted them. The Upano Valley civilization predates both of them by 100 years and built dense garden cities. The Beni Mounds spanned over 20k earthen mounds and human-made forest islands that were connected by massive canals and causeways

I'm sorry but you didn't write that, and so I thought it was interesting to add. Maybe you added it in a different comment.

Ah, you're right. Different comment. My mixup, sorry

> since they couldn't have been more than a decade behind the smallpox/diseases

They weren't. It took centuries for them to make any inroad into the Amazon.

> I don't think a few years is enough to erase all trace of human intervention

Appreciate you stating your assumptions.

you might be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Without_Us

> The World Without Us is a 2007 non-fiction book about what would happen to the natural and built environment if humans suddenly disappeared... it outlines, for example, how cities and houses would deteriorate, how long man-made artifacts would last, and how remaining lifeforms would evolve. Weisman concludes that residential neighborhoods would become forests within 500 years