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- [00:01]
Tristan Hughes
Thanks for listening to the Ancients. You can get all history hit podcasts.
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Lawrence Blair
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Tristan Hughes
Along with hundreds of original history documentaries by subscribing. Head over to historyhit.com subscribe hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds.
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Ryan Reynolds
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
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- [01:23]
Tristan Hughes
2000 years ago, at the same time that great cities like Rome, Athens and Alexandria were at their height in the Mediterranean, thousands of miles to the west across the Atlantic Ocean, equally large and thriving cities were being constructed in the ancient Amazon, epicenters of extraordinary little known civilizations who molded the world's largest rainforest to thrive in their millions. Today, we often see the Amazon Basin as an endless expanse of trees and rainforest. But this massive area of South America spanning eight countries, was home to a huge range of landscapes, biodiversity and ancient civilizations. The ancient Amazon is a story of agriculture and farming stretching back 8,000 years, of fish fueled civilizations along the coast, of cities and highways, of beautiful ceramics and art, and maybe even of an Amazonian Pompeii situated beneath a still smouldering volcano, it's the Ancients on History hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host and in today's episode, while we're exploring the extraordinary ancient civilizations that lived all across the ancient Amazon Basin in South America. This area of the world is one of the most exciting for archaeologists right now because new technological advancements are starting to uncover a whole range of ancient sites beneath the trees. Sites that belong to prosperous, well organized urbanized societies spread out across a densely populated and richly diverse Landscape. To talk through this story, I was delighted to interview the journalist, writer and author Lawrence Blair, who has just written a new book that explores these vanished civilizations of the ancient Amazon and more. Lawrence. He dialed in from South America for this interview, so we were incredibly grateful for his time. Now sit back and enjoy as we cover the story of the ancient Amazon.
- [03:36]
Lawrence Blair
Lawrence, it is great to have you on the podcast.
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks so much for having me, Tristan. Really pleased to be here.
- [03:42]
Lawrence Blair
I mean, the Amazon and the ancient Amazon. I must admit, when someone mentions the Amazon today, it still feels, at least to me, quite like a frontier area, Lawrence, with uncontacted peoples and so on.
- [03:53]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely.
- [03:54]
Lawrence Blair
But looking at what you've written and the research, this needs to be an area full of amazing different ancient civilizations that were there thousands of years ago.
- [04:04]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Oh, definitely. You know, I think we think we all have this idea, don't we, of the Amazon is, yeah, this pristine wilderness, this kind of backwater, and it's so far away from anything and everything. But actually, you know, what's so fascinating is, you know, in the past few decades alone, that idea is really being turned on its head. And actually, you know, we're discovering more and more archeologists from Brazil around and around the world, and various South American countries are finding that this is really a center of world history and should be kind of considered as being up there with the Mexica or the Aztecs, with the Maya, even the Incas and any of the great ancient civilizations of the world. So I'm really thrilled to have a chance to talk to you about some of them today.
- [04:45]
Lawrence Blair
It's nice that you mentioned names straight away. Like you said, Aztec, Maya, Inca, those kind of Mesoamerican civilizations we sometimes think of. And then to put these peoples who lived in the Amazon, sometimes contemporarily with those civilizations, we can really delve into that link as well. But no such thing as a silly question to kick it all off. I'm sure we've all got a rough idea about where the Amazon is, but I feel if we delve into the details, it's a bit more complex. Lawrence, what and where is the Amazon?
- [05:12]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That's a great question. So the Amazon, you know, is a huge area. It's the size of Western Europe. It spans eight countries. Here in South America, we're talking about a dozen major rivers that are crisscrossing it. Of course, the Amazon river is the most famous one. It's 4,000 miles long, and it's the largest tropical forest on the planet. And of Course, it's crucial to the Earth's climate as well. And I think one thing to make clear is, you know, it's not just this kind of endless expanse of trees, you know, of jungle, to put it that way. We're talking about a huge range of landscapes. You know, you've got these kind of tabletop mountains in Venezuela, Colombia and Guyana, a cloud forest on the eastern slopes of the Andes, big cities, you know, in Manaus and Belem there about, you know, 30 million people or so who live in the Amazon today. And of course also we have this kind of marshy swamp land near the mouth of the river and these kind of floodplains in northern Bolivia. So it's really, it's a kind of mosaic of different landscapes and of course would have looked very different, you know, 500, 1,000, 10,000 years ago, perhaps a bit drier, perhaps more savannah. It dispersed with the forest. And I think, you know, one key concept to think about is this idea of this pristine rainforest today that we're looking at in still exists in some places is actually a bit more like a very carefully tended garden that's grown wild.
- [06:33]
Lawrence Blair
And what do you mean by a savanna there? Because I think of Africa. Do we mean like tall grasses and big plains as well?
- [06:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Exactly. We're talking about, you know, floodplains which don't have forests, but during the season where the river is lower, grasses grow. We're talking about patches of forest, patches of grassland, you know, interspersed with forest. So really a mixture. And the Amazon connects with ecosystems on all different sides as well. So really a diverse and very biodiverse landscape. It holds millions and millions of species, many of which we probably haven't even discovered yet.
- [07:06]
Lawrence Blair
And it feels like highlighting that biodiversity, that variance in geographical landscapes across the Amazon. And you mentioned looked it was quite a bit different in ancient prehistoric times, but it's still that great diversity of biomes almost. It feels that must be really important to highlight straight away, I guess, when we cover the different peoples that existed here, it's not everyone living very similarly. I'm guessing an ancient people living, let's say, in the mountains at the Tabletops would have had a very different life to those on an ancient savannah of the Amazon.
- [07:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely. We're talking about a huge cultural diversity, hundreds of different groups, thousands even, with hundreds of different languages, you know, whose ways of life probably change over the millennia. You know, we have. You have small groups of kind of anarchistic hunter gatherers who are quite sort of almost democratic perhaps in the way they run their affairs, then you have these seasonal farmers, you have big urban centers which we'll talk about in a little bit. And some of these people, of course, are still around. You know, the descendants are still here, and they still have a lot to teach us. Others, of course, are no longer here, and we don't even know their names. And I think that this is the real challenge we have here. You know, you know, the Mexica or the Maya, even the Inca, you know, they had some forms of writing. You know, the Inca had the quipu with these kind of knotted memory cords. And of course, they interacted very closely with the Spanish, with the. With the ancient Amazonians. We have so little to go on. You know, it's. It's quite fragmentary. They left some paintings, pictograms on cliff faces. And there's a really fascinating site called the Serenia de Chirubicate in Colombia, which people often call the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.
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Lawrence Blair
Sorry, what? The Sistine Chapel of the Amazon.
- [08:48]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I know it's this amazing spot which is actually off limits to tourists, but it's these huge tabletop mountains and about 20,000 or so and counting of these pictograms in red dye. And for me, the most fascinating thing is that, you know, people are still adding to them. There are uncontacted people in the area who are still painting. And so it's almost this kind of work in progress from the kind of late Stone Age, really just still being added to. So that's one bit of evidence there. But also we have other things. We have things that outsiders wrote about them, Portuguese, Spanish missionaries, gold hunters, bounty hunters. And of course, we have to take a lot of that with a pinch of salt. We also have the archaeological record. We have pottery at a huge amount of pottery. We have animal bones. We have these huge glyphs, you know, what are called geoglyphs. So the way that these people shape the landscape around them to build roads, ditches, ponds, temples, pyramids. And I think the most intriguing thing here as well is actually more and more archeologists, or this particular class of archeologists called the paleobotanist, they're looking at the trees themselves and plant evidence to kind of understand how actually the Amazon was being molded over over many thousands of years by human hands.
- [10:06]
Lawrence Blair
And it makes sense, doesn't it, as you mentioned earlier, because of how much, how important the Amazon is, how rich and diverse it is in the plant types. It has available that scientists, with modern scientific developments and archaeologists, they are using that as a particular source of Information to learn more about the landscape in ancient history. So often in the podcast we focus on texts, on histories and on pottery, which no doubt we will look at archaeological items like pottery. But it seems here with the Amazon, this is taking it to the next level where you also look to a huge extent at the plant material too.
- [10:40]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Oh, definitely. You know, I think as people who are fascinated by the past, you know, we have a kind of bias, don't we, towards temples and ruins and we want to see stone buildings, we want to see, you know, papyrus. And those things of course, are fantastic when you have them. But I think we need to almost break out of the idea that every ancient culture should have those things, that actually there are ways that you can leave a legacy in a way that you can, you know, build a society that really flourishes without large stone buildings and without written writing. So it's almost kind of trying to flip the script a little bit and almost understand the real diversity of ancient human societies before we delve into all.
- [11:20]
Lawrence Blair
That with that new technology and new amazing discoveries that have been in the news very recently and really want to get to. You did mention there about the writings, these later writings of Spaniards, of explorers visiting The Amazon Some 500 or so years ago. I mean that, that was interesting to me straight away, if that is kind of a written source. But, but how is that a written source for learning about the ancient Amazon? Are they just interacting with locals and learning more about what they believe their history was?
- [11:48]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yeah, I mean, you know, but really these first people that are going through the Amazon, they have an agenda. You know, we have this famous voyage by Francisco de orellana and about 60 or so men who go to the Amazon in search of this land rich in cinnamon, which presumably the Andeans and Incas have kind of told them about. So even there, you know, the, the pre Colombian peoples of the, of the Andes, you know, have this concept of the Amazon as being this kind of quite dangerous, exciting, wealthy place. So we have this voyage in 1541, 1542, with this group of around 60 Spaniards, Africans, Andeans, and they have this incredible eight month voyage down the Amazon. And you know, they meet some people who are friendly and really take them in and give them food and show them this incredible wealth in terms of ceramics and art. In other places they really meet very stiff opposition. And I think the locals can, you know, they tweak quite early on that these guys do not mean us well. And so they're fighting these running battles and they're being chased Away from towns and they're starving, that they're eating crabs there. They're eating roots and herbs which Gaspar de Carvajal, who's the chaplain who chronicles this trip, says, you know, made us turn mad and witless. Perhaps they were, you know, chewing on an ayahuasca plant or something there. So it's this very strange journey, and they come across these tall warrior women which they call the Amazons, and they talk about these great cities which are just kind of glimmering in land. And, you know, there's a fantastic quote by this chaplain, Carvajal, who says, all those we part, we have passed along this river are people of much intelligence and ingenuity. You know, they're passing these really. These towns which are crammed cheek by jowl along, along the riverbanks, you know, and it's almost this. This fascinating glimpse of this lost world. And they weren't the only ones. Some of your listeners may have heard of Mario Vespucci, who's the man who gives his name to the Americas, and he also kind of skirts his way down the Amazon coastline in 1500. And he says, you know, all the ancient authors, the people that you'll be familiar with. Tristan, you know, your Pliny's and your Aristotle's said, no, no, no, once you go south of the equator, it's just water. There's nothing there. Or if there is a landmass there, it's completely uninhabited. You know, it's almost a sort of wasteland. But Vespucci says, no, no, no, they've got it wrong. Their opinion is false, he says, and utterly opposed to the truth. In those southern parts, I have found the continent more densely peopled than our Europe or Asia or Africa. So they're quite clear. But for centuries, you know, these tales of this almost urbanized Amazon are really relegated to the realm of legendary.
- [14:34]
Lawrence Blair
Why? Why are they relegated to the realm of legend? You'd have thought that more and more people would be fascinated from it earlier on. Why do we then get this kind of later myth that actually this was a land without history almost?
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I think that's a really fascinating question. And I think part of it is because, well, you know, let's look at these guys who've survived this voyage, that they're not the most reliable narratives. You know, as I said, they spend a lot of time kind of tripping on these hallucinogenic herbs. Some of them are being poisoned by tree frog toxins, which can also cause you to. To have visions. And often they don't even dare to disembark. They say that the vessel was so full of arrows that it looked like a porcupine. So how reliable was this testimony? And also, I think locals, Amazonians, they had an incentive maybe to fob them off a bit and go, listen, if you just carry on another few miles downriver, there's this incredible city, and it's dripping in gold, and it's got these powerfully built warrior queens who take menace there as they're captives in war. I mean, you know, what a great way to get these guys to hurry up and move on out of town. And I think that. I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is that the diseases which Europeans bring to the New World, which indigenous peoples and nations have very little resistance to, they really cause a. They really inflict a terrible toll in the Amazon. You know, as I say, these are quite densely populated, quite mobile communities with these big trading networks. They send ambassadors to each other, they send traders, they send explorers. So these are perfect vectors for typhus, malaria, for smallpox. And so I think by the time that Europeans kind of come back in force, about a century later, in the early 1600s, there's not much evidence left of these people. The villages are now gone, and it's just kind of pure jungle. And so there's one Portuguese chronicler who says, you know, these indigenous peoples here in Brazil, they're not like the ones in the Andes or Mesoamerica. They live in disorder. They're godless, lawless, they're leaderless. And I think that you mentioned the idea of Amazon being a land without history. That was famously the conclusion of this Brazilian geographer called Euclides Da, who helped map out Brazil's borders with Peru. And he said, this is a land without history. And I think that idea really has persisted until quite recently archaeologists, particularly ones from the United States, who came down to Brazil in the 40s and 50s, they said, well, look, the soil here in the Amazon has always been washed away by its downpours. There's no stone. There's not enough metal for tools. There's no big animals to hunt. So this is not really a hospitable place. It's really hostile. And even Brazil's military dictatorship in the 70s encourages people to come and settle the Amazon. And the slogan is a land without men, for men without land. And even today you have conservationists who I think mean very well, and they. But they will tell you, when they, you know, doing their funding drives, they'll say, you know, the Amazon, and I quote, is a vast untamed wilderness. So the notion of Amazonia is this kind of backwater on the edge of world history, I think is pretty alive and kicking.
- [17:33]
Lawrence Blair
It really is. But let's turn to the bright exciting part now. Lawrence, how are the tables starting to turn? What's the progress that is being made in dispelling this myth? And there's some really interesting case studies that I think we're going to focus on one by one now.
- [17:48]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely, yeah. So this is really cutting edge stuff and I think it's changing every day and it's so controversial and exciting, but I think it's the new kind of frontier in world history and archeology. I think one element of how this is changing is the fact we have these new technologies and these new tools. And I think the key one of these is lidar, which you, I think you may well have talked about in your episode on the Maya.
- [18:12]
Lawrence Blair
We probably, we probably have. But you know, for our listeners, Lawrence, please explain, what exactly is lidar?
- [18:18]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
So lidar, it stands for light detection and ranging. And basically this involves flying over a forested area in a plane and shooting laser pulses, basically laser beams out of the plane towards the ground. And you measure how long it takes for them to bounce back. And these laser pulses, they can penetrate through jungle canopy and they kind of, it's almost a bit like a bat, you know, scanning a cave with these kind of sonar squeaks. It gives you this idea of the topography and of course that includes we're talking about structures, basically man made structures, ditches, roads, temples. And that's really revolutionized archeology in many forested, many tropical areas. But I think no where more so in the Amazon. And I want to talk about one particular case in particular which is only really just revealed at the start of this year. This area is in lowland Amazonian Ecuador, an area called the Upano Valley. Jungle valley, thick forest, a big snowy volcano called Sangay kind of looming over it. And people have known for a long time that there were some structures here or some kind of mounds, maybe a dozen or so, two dozen of these kind of mounds rising up from the forest floor with pottery. But we didn't really know how many there were and kind of what connected them until recently when Ecuadorian archeologists and international archeologists did a massive lidar survey. And what they found was just astounding. You know, we're talking about more than 6,000 of these, of these mounds and platforms. Some of them are 140 meters long and 40 meters long.
- [19:51]
Lawrence Blair
6,000 in that one valley, 6,000 in this one valley.
- [19:56]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's just the area that they've surveyed and these kind of effectively pyramids, you know, they're clustered in the. In these 15 settlements. And it seems to be they seem to have been the foundations of temples and houses. And, you know, it looks like this is a society of upwards of 30,000, maybe even 100,000 people. And we can see that they were carving these fields and terraces into the hillsides with very fertile soil there because of this nearby volcano. And the most exciting thing that people have pointed to here is this network of these wide, straight roads, thoroughfares even, that cut through the hillsides and seemingly go over rivers and connecting these different towns, neighborhoods, and houses. And I think these seem to be the streets and the highways of a really organized, urbanized culture with serious resources and manpower, which is centered around two particular cities which the researchers have dubbed Kilomope and Sangay. And I think what's also really fascinating here is they've done radiocarbon dating on some of these sites, and it seems as though these kind of garden cities here in the Upano Valley were inhabited from roughly 500 BC through to 450 AD.
- [21:10]
Lawrence Blair
So these are the various different parts of an ancient urban society that we'd usually connect with, I don't know, ancient Rome or maybe Teotihuacan further north. And it's at the same time as those cities are in existence in ancient times.
- [21:24]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely. Yeah. It's the classic development of an early society. It's got roads, we've got agriculture, we have got some form of urbanism. So, like you say, we're really in the same league as classical antiquity around the world. And in fact, Steven Rostin, who's one of the leading archeologists on this particular case, has called them, these cities, an Amazonian Rome, which I think is a great bit of branding, but I think is also accurate. You know, we're dealing with this really interesting culture here, and I think, you know, I say this is just the tip of the iceberg when we're talking about what LIDAR could reveal. There's a study last year which was the largest LIDAR survey to date, and kind of looked at one huge area, and then extrapolated from that, and it said that there could be as many as 24,000 pre Hispanic earthworks. We're talking about ponds, ditches, paths, geoglyphs, buildings which still remain hidden under the.
- [22:16]
Lawrence Blair
Forest in that one valley or a bit further out we're talking about in.
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Professor Susanna Lipscomb
The Amazon as a whole, you know.
- [22:21]
Lawrence Blair
Yeah, that would be quite something if it was all in one. The Upanoa Valley, I must admit. Well, I had to ask.
- [22:26]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
No, but it really, we're really looking at these several centers, and that's not the only one. We also have area in northern Bolivia with these huge temples and geoglyphs and carvings and and sort of this kind of almost waterlogged irrigation system which almost looked like something from from the Nile, from the Ganges. So really, we're the tip of the iceberg.
- [22:57]
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit we do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry viii, from Anne Boleyn to her daughter Elizabeth I. But we also do lots that's not Tudors, murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title really. So follow not just the Tudors from History hit wherever you get your podcasts.
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Lawrence Blair
So you can also potentially, as you highlighted there, irrigation is something which must also be, you know, so intertwined with these cultures. You're getting a little sense, I guess it said just the tip of the iceberg. But to learn more about the ancient engineering, how they watered their field systems and also, I mean you mentioned how upon valley kind of linked as like the Amazonian Rome. Well, if it's got the volcano very nearby and it's fertile lands, it feels more like an Amazonian Pompeii in one kind of way. So hopefully it doesn't have that same infamous end. But it still is it, it's the tip of the iceberg. There could be so much more discovered in the years ahead.
- [26:20]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely. I think, you know, there, like you say, you have this kind of almost ready made fertile soil which is really perhaps gives them a head start. And I think it's not coincidental that a lot of we'll come back to this later on. But a lot of the early domestication of crops, including even cacao, famously used in chocolate, seems to actually have not originated in the Andes or in Mesoamerica, but from that bit of Amazonian Ecuador. So these are real pioneers. But even elsewhere where you don't necessarily have this fertile log volcanic soil and you have a lot more rain, you have these kind of rivers which wash away the soil. There's actually a growing consensus that Amazonians were actually engineering this kind of remarkable substance of their own which laid the foundations for these kind of thriving, long lasting kingdoms in the rainforest. And that substance is called terra preta in Portuguese or dark earth in English to the likes of you and me. And to kind of just give your listeners a sense of what it's like, this is a kind of deep brown, almost kind of black soil. Think about, you know, prodding a black forest gateau. It's that it's kind of got that spongy touch to it. It's effectively ancient trash. You know it's rubbish, but people, even today, Brazilian farmers really treat it like treasure. And this stuff contains got animal bones, it's got mollusk shells, it's got pot shards, charcoal, and full of all these kind of nutrients which agriculture needs. Calcium, zinc, phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium. And fascinatingly where you find it in the densest concentrations in the Amazon is along these kind of bluffs above these riverbanks. Exactly the kind of places where Carvajal and Orellana saw these really densely packed settlements. There's some disagreement about exactly what therapy is and where it comes from. And the traditional view is okay, well this is this kind of rubbish. It's accidental byproduct of latrines and cook fires from millennia ago. Others are said this is river sediment, it just is appearing naturally. But actually the growing consensus is that this stuff was actually generated on purpose. It's a way of deliberately enhancing Amazonian soil to sustain long term habitation.
- [28:32]
Lawrence Blair
So is this the kind of Amazonian developed fertilizer or kind of special man made soil potentially?
- [28:38]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Exactly, exactly. I think that that's what we could be dealing with here. Just to give you an example of one kind of people that use this stuff, we have the Kuikuro who are an Amazonian people. They're still around today along the Upper Xingu river for those who know where that is. And they settled that area about a century before 1492. These big towns of a thousand people ringed by paths and wooden palisades. Today there's only around 800 of them, but you know, they still live in these circular thatched villages and they still pile their wastes, ash, peel from the vegetables, fish bones, broken pots, charcoal, into these big heaps known as mittens. And they leave it for a few years and then they go and spread it on their garden plots and they grow, you know, what they get out of them is incredible sweet potatoes, beans, papaya, cotton, tobacco. And if they leave the soil alone, they don't plant anything. Jungle sprouts from it within a couple of weeks. So it's incredibly fertile. A study just last year has analyzed that terra preta, this modern terra preta created by the cuicuro with the ancient kind. And they found that it's exactly the same in its chemical composition, or pretty much exactly the same. It's just as fertile, just as rich in organic matter. And also it tends to occur near plazas, near squares and near houses. And so the authors of this study, who include several, we call it all researchers, they say, well you know, this is a very Strong hint that terra preta has been around for millennia and has really been used by ancient Amazonians. It's kind of an ancient agricultural technology which locks carbon into the soil, actually, rather than releasing it to the atmosphere, and potentially seems to be producing food for many millions of people across the ancient Amazon.
- [30:16]
Lawrence Blair
And that soil, I say we sometimes overlook this part, don't we? Of course. But with farming societies, that soil is crucial to the creation and then sustaining of large, large groups of people, huge groups of people in an area of the world. So that soil is testament, do we think, must have been central to the great size, presumably, of many of these ancient peoples who lived all across the Amazon.
- [30:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely. I think that this is almost their secret sauce. It kind of helps them get the edge and build these kind of towns and cities. And I think it's interesting that you. Where you see these really, really thick deposits of terra preta is also where you see really dense deposits of ceramics and pottery and signs that people are kind of really thriving. There's one spot I went to a few years ago, it's called Teotonio. It's this quite small fishing village with brick bungalows on the Madeira river in the Brazilian Amazon estate called Rondonia. And this has some of the most densely packed terra preta anywhere in the Amazon. If you think about Holloways in the English countryside, we walk down these tracks and you have these big banks rising either side of you that you know, and it's studded with these pottery. And this actually seems to be one of the longest continually inhabited places on the planet. And actually a crucible of not only American civilization, by which I mean the Americas as a whole, but even world civilization. Because here you have ancestors of two indigenous groups, or family groups, I suppose, called the Arawak and the Tubigarani, who kind of seem to almost originate from here. They're hunting, they're fishing, they're farming, they're domesticating wild plants and vegetables, fruits, developing new languages, and they're going on the move as well. The Arawak, actually especially intrepid navigators. We find their descendants and their people in the Chaco Forest of northern Paraguay, where I'm calling here today the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela, Guyana and in the Bahamas. And actually, it's their descendants, the Taino, who come across Columbus on Hispaniola in 1492. And we actually use Arawak and Taino words every day. You know, barbecue, canoe, hammock, hurricane, maize, potato, tobacco. These are things which have their ultimate origin in the Amazon. And Just to say a quick thing about the pottery which these people are producing, it's just prodigious. You know, I went into this. This storeroom, this vault in Rondonia with two local archeologists, and it's just packed the rafters with crates after crates of this stuff. You know, cauldrons, vessels, urns for burying the dead. It's polished, it's brightly painted. There are monkeys, there are serpents, you know, And I think the key thing to bear in mind, this isn't just, you know, crockery. This stuff is really crucial because it shows us that these aren't people who were, you know, scratching a living or kind of frozen in time. You know, these are sedentary, cosmopolitan societies that have enough food and enough fuel and material to support this kind of industry of artists and artisans.
- [33:16]
Lawrence Blair
I mean, Lawrence, you call it a crucible of civilization, this particular area. And you've highlighted some of the archeology there with that pottery. And it's interesting that it depicts some of those animals that they would have shared their world with. How far back does that archeology go? How far back in ancient history are we talking with people living, sedentary, living, farming in that area of the world and creating all this beautiful stuff?
- [33:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yeah, that boundary is being pushed back further and further every year. But we're looking at some really dense terra preta deposits from about 6,000 years ago. And actually the oldest ceramics that have ever been found anywhere in the Americas, north or south, actually were found in the Amazon. And they seem to date back to about 7,000 years ago. And even going even further back, we have plant materials, fossilized seeds, food waste, which goes back 9,000 years ago. And I think this is also the other kind of secret substance, the other kind of key ingredient, which really perhaps explains the flourishing of these Amazonian civilizations. It seems as though ancient Amazonians were actually improving and adapting the forest around them. Archeologists have identified at least 80 species. We're talking about cassava, sweet potato, Brazil nuts, peppers, fruits, palms, tobacco.
- [34:35]
Lawrence Blair
Oh, crop, different crop types that they were cultivating.
- [34:37]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Okay, exactly. So taking a kind of wild variety and then, you know, experimenting with it, propagating it, planting it, you know, until you get the best kind of yield. I don't know if. Tristan, have you ever tried a kind of purplish fruit called acai?
- [34:50]
Lawrence Blair
I like to think I'm adventurous with these trying things, but I'm afraid I have not come across that one.
- [34:55]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, you have to look out for it next time you're at an ice cream shop, but it's starting to take off, particularly in this hemisphere. It's delicious kind of purpley fruit. It's tasted a little bit like bubblegum, a little bit like raspberry. And this is a fruit which ancient Amazonians basically domesticated and propagated and made it so that it kind of flourishes in these massive big berry pods. Basically. It's this really abundant fruit full of all kinds of good stuff. And so this process of domesticating these crop or these plants, I should say these fruits, this was well underway by about 6000 BC. So it's up there in the same league as.
- [35:30]
Lawrence Blair
Yeah, that's a mind blowing. I'm sorry to interrupt once again, but this is a mind blowing and this is a time for comparison and contrasting with us place in the world. Lawrence, 6,000 years ago. They're already testing in the Amazon these different crop types. You know, it's, I mean, roughly in Britain and I really stress roughly. But let's say 5,000 years ago, you've got Skara Brae in Orkney and you've got the farming really taking root in places in Britain and maybe stretching like 6,000 years ago. Well, yeah, around there, 3,500 B.C. you know, at the same time or even earlier in the Amazon, farming has really taken root and a rich diversity of farming as well. It's a fascinating part of this discussion when you can compare the Amazon that time really far back in time with places like Britain and like Mesopotamia as well, the Fertile Crescent, you know, it two areas practicing farming, you know, at the same time, but complete other parts of the world.
- [36:26]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely. You know. Yeah, you see these maps of the world which have little circles saying, well, here's where kind of crops originate, here's where farming starts. And the Amazon is very rarely included. Sometimes you might see the Andes or Amazon and Diesel, Mesoamerica included. But I think we need to add another circle, you know, for the kind of the western Amazon in particular. And yeah, this is really. It's one of the kind of, you know, major centers where farming, I think farming, we can talk about that. I think it might even be better to use the word agroforestry because this is a kind of way of planting, planting crops, planting fruits, vegetables, which doesn't involve large amounts of deforestation, crucially. And we're not just talking about kind of tree hugging for the sake of it. What we see is that Amazonian civilizations are actually creating these trails through the forest about 25 miles into the jungle from their settlements. And Planting useful, propagating useful fruit trees and vegetables along those trails. And I think it's just common sense because if you haven't got access to metal tools, if you're using a stone ax, it takes you all day to cut down a tree. So, you know, it's much easier if you just, okay, we'll thin out the undergrowth a little bit and we'll basically plant this kind of living larder, you know, which kind of is going to restock itself. You know, it's, it's simple. And I think, you know, to give another example, I think we touched on this already, but these crops we think of as being quintessentially Andean, like maize or quintessentially Mesoamerican, like cacao, actually seem to have originated in northwestern Amazonia. You know, so cacao, you know, the Mexica and the Maya, they use its currency, they drink it as this sacred bitter drink called chocolate, was actually first being consumed in the Ecuadorian Amazon about 5,300 years ago, maybe by the ancestors of those Upano Valley garden cities. So I think the point you make there, Tristan, about, you know, a comparison with England with English countryside or the British countryside, I think is a good one, you know, because today it's this kind of jumbled landscape. It's gardens, fields, parkland, copses. I think we, we now understand that it's neither entirely natural nor entirely man made. Right. And I think if we go, you can go back a few centuries ago, our ancestors in Britain or across Western Europe were really depending on the forest. You know, they were coppicing, they were making hedgerows, they were gathering firewood, they were hunting. It's not so long ago that we were also in much closer contact with, you know, we were molded and molded by the woods. So, and you know, I think just to sum up this stuff on the plant domestication, the rainforest today perhaps has an estimated 400 billion trees. The cautious estimate is that around 10% of them, 40 billion, are there because of humans. And some would put that figure a lot higher and say that we're basically looking at a domesticated forest.
- [39:17]
Lawrence Blair
I mean, that is extraordinary.
- [39:31]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and on not just the Tudors from history hit. We do admittedly cover quite a lot of Tudors, from the rise of Henry VII to the death of Henry viii, from Anne below in to her daughter Elizabeth the first. But we also do lots that's not Tudors. Murderers, mistresses, pirates and witches. Clues in the title really. So follow not just The Tudors from history hit wherever you get your podcasts.
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Lawrence Blair
I think you've also revealed how there is still so much to explore. As I mentioned at the beginning about this topic and how we are today really just scratching the surface, but giving a great overview and insight and more people can explore this further because there are so many stories, so many archaeological stories yet to be discovered or to be brought to the fore from the ancient Amazon, which is extraordinary. But let's move on because as you said, we've talked about the plants, the trees, that part, that important part of the Amazon. But there is one big feature that we haven't really covered yet, or we have, we've just covered a bit in passing, is a transport method which is of course the River Amazon. Now Lawrence, we talked about, you know, getting food from the land and soil. What about the fruits of the rivers? The fruits of the River Amazon? Do we know about that with these ancient civilizations in the Amazon?
- [41:29]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Absolutely. Tristan. Yeah, I mean, he goes to the Amazon today. I mean, right now there's a really bad drought, unfortunately, which maybe we'll talk about in a bit, but they really bring us home. How much people even today depend on the rivers of the rainforest, not just the Amazon, the sole moist, the Rio Negro. You know, this is really a life that's lived on the water or in close contact with the water. Fish is your main kind of protein source. So it's natural, of course, that people would have really depended on that centuries or millennia ago to set the scene for your listeners. If you take the ferry down the Rio Amazon today, you set off from Manaus, you sling your hammock, you find a little spot to squeeze in there amongst the passengers. It takes you about five days to get down to the mouth of the Amazon at a place called Belem, which is actually where the COP conference Climate conference is going to be held next year. And so you have this big city on the one hand, on the left you have this place called Marascho island, which is this kind of Switzerland sized landmass. And it's actually there which one of the rainforest's longest lasting civilizations emerged. And again, we have the same pattern as with Ecuador. You know, Brazilian scholars noted that, okay, there were some hillocks here. This is an island which is often underwater for half the year. But it has these mounds and it has these, interestingly, these female figurines, these kind of feminine divine images which obviously we see in other parts of the ancient world as well. You know, the Venus figure, you know, which is quite familiar to a lot of early societies. So we have these mounds here on Marisol Island. But, you know, the idea was, well, this is kind of maybe just a not particularly sophisticated society. Maybe they're descendants of an Andean migration that's, you know, that's come down from the Andes, come down the rivers and have kind of gradually shed their quote, unquote civilized ways here in the terrible tropics, because it's right on the equator, this particular spot. But again, recent surveys, recent technologies, a change in perspective maybe has helped us find evidence to suggest the opposite. We have in fact hundreds of these platforms scattered across an area of 7,000 square miles. They've got clay floors, cemeteries, fireplaces, hearths that have burned consistently for centuries. And you know, the first signs of habitation here are dating back to 3500 BC. But actually these are places of really sustained feasting, worshiping, mourning for over a millennium after A.D. 300. And intriguingly, we have some skeletons from the Marajoara, this ancient people, and they actually seem to have been healthier and stronger, almost a bit like a kind of modern day Greco Roman wrestler than even the average Brazilian today. And actually if you look at the pottery on the ceramics, you see this feminine divine imagery. And the graves of women are actually richer in goods. So maybe it's something a little bit like the Amazons that we talked about in Carver House Chronicle, you know, these warrior women. Perhaps we're seeing an echo of that in the archeological record in the sense that we have Manishoa women who were kind of actually calling the shots and maybe even taking their pick of these kind of muscle bound admirers. And just one thing I want to also say about these, what's the foundation of this culture? But it seems like they were able to harvest all these aquatic resources, the piranhas, the turtles, the catfish, by building this really ingenious system of ponds and dams, bridges, to capture them as the kind of flood water came in every season. And then when it came out Leave behind this, you know, effectively a huge archipelago of fish farms. So you travel back to Marijuana island, you know, maybe a century before Columbus, and you might see this kind of archipelago of towns connected by bridges and walkways and populated by these kind of industrious and relatively egalitarian fish farmers and potters. You know, that there doesn't seem to have been this kind of single overbearing king or priestly class, which again, I think flips the script a little bit about what we think about ancient societies. You know, the pharaoh or the king, perhaps, because of the way the environment is so rich and so bountiful. You actually, you know, you don't need to kind of kowtow to this kind of, you know, all powerful chief because if he gets too big for his boots, you can sort of set off into the forest for yourself and your family and start your own thing.
- [46:05]
Lawrence Blair
I'm just taking note of the marijuana culture. I mean, I've got pictures of their pottery in front of me now, and it's another one of those civilizations that I'd never heard of. But now I know that we have to do a whole ancient episode just dedicated to that culture because they are, I mean, wow. Never heard of them. But incredible archeology that has survived and more no doubt will be uncovered. Fishing piranhas. I mean, that is quite something.
- [46:27]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
You've got to be careful. Yeah. And you know, and to mention those pots. Yeah, there's. We have some of them which still survive and they're huge. You know, going to a museum in Belem a few years ago. And, you know, they're almost the size of two kind of outstretched arms. You can't get your hands around them. They're massive and they have these protuberances and these almost the kind of fish lips, monkey ears, this kind of owlish expression, even these kind of extended beards, like the. The beards you see on pharaoh's kind of mummies. So really creative, really artistic.
- [46:58]
Lawrence Blair
I feel there'll be more stories about that in the news. Absolutely. Over the next few months and years. Because, I mean, what it looks like is incredible. But we do have to move on as this is the overview of the ancient Amazon. And before we completely wrap up, Lawrence, I think you know what's coming. We've covered all these amazing, diverse, ancient civilizations in various parts of the Amazon and how long ago they were farming this area of the world, this rich biodiverse area of the world. What happened to all these prosperous civilizations, these prosperous, urbanized societies?
- [47:26]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yeah, I think it's a great question, and it's really one of those great mysteries because we don't have Amazonians themselves outside of oral legend, telling us what happened to their distant ancestors. I think one factor in the mix was climate change. In the millennium prior to 1492. You see in the archaeological record these big long range migrations by Amazonians and by other lowland peoples in South America. It's almost as if they're fleeing something, they're running away from something, they're displaced by something. And we mentioned the Upano Valley cities, that they're in the shadow of this big ominous volcano. And you quite rightly mentioned Pompeii. Well, we don't yet know, but it seems perhaps there was a big catastrophic eruption of this volcano whose name is Sangay, which in Quechua means the frightener. So it's almost as if it was waiting to happen. And if suddenly your fields are covered in pyroclastic flow, it's not only going to have an impact on you, but also on your neighbors and your distant trading partners. We're talking about cultures which are really in close contact with each other. And across the Amazon, production of terra preta, that magical black soil that we talked about, it really falls off sharply around 81,000. There's much less of this organic soil being produced. And you start to see walls made of earth and wood springing up. It's almost like we're seeing this breakdown in this more pacifistic commercial archipelago of different peoples and almost people that kind of digging in really and fighting each other. And around A.D. 1200, the Maraschal Mounds that we talked about on the island near Belem were abandoned as the rain seemed to be drying up. And their fish ponds probably went dry and turned kind of salty because you're right there on the border of the Atlantic. And as these societies grew more complex, you know, I think a sudden shortage of a particular fish or a plant or a commodity could really, could really have a kind of domino effect, you know, and trigger this rolling collapse. You know, right now in South America, you know, say we, we're living through this really historic drought. The Amazon river is almost at its lowest level since people can remember, since it's been recorded. And that's causing problems even today. You know, people can't transport their goods, people can't get to schools and hospitals. So I think, you know, that would have had a huge impact if, you know, seasonal variations or cyclical variations in the climate had an effect there. And one thing that's been revealed by recent droughts are these carvings in the riverbank near Manaus that show these kind of ghostly faces, a bit like the Scream, that famous Everard monk painting. And there's also these grooves for sharpening weapons. So I think that maybe gives us a hint of what was going on. And crucially, I think as we mentioned already, it's the European illnesses, these plagues which sweep through these places and you know, before many Europeans even arrive, I think crucially, even before Europeans really properly invaded, let's say South America, these illnesses were racing ahead of them before they quote unquote conquered the Incas. The Inca empire had already been ravaged by European illnesses because they were transmitted from one trader to another traveler to another diplomat. So really those, those very thriving villages which Brianna and Carvajal saw in, in the 1540s were perhaps only the shadow of these great Amazonian powers. And I think actually if we think about some of the Amazonian peoples that are still uncontacted today or living in voluntary isolation is the kind of preferred term because they're people who are choosing to avoid us and with good reason in many cases. And these aren't people who have necessarily been living like that since the Stone Age. They may even be the great grandchildren of settled, prosperous Amazonian societies which just outside of living memory, have run away from European colonization. Around 1900 there was a massive rubber boom in the Amazon that really saw horrific abuses perpetrated against the Amazonian peoples by different companies from Britain, from the United States. And so these are people who actually haven't always been like that, but actually are still living. Well, you know, they've realized that perhaps they don't need to live in cities. They don't need to live in a way which we would recognize as being a kind of urban, prosperous society because they have what they need. You know, their ancestors have planted this biome with many, many life giving species and have developed it to be almost the perfect niche for humans to thrive. And I think that's a really important message to bring home here. You know, this knowledge of how to live sustainably with the rainforest still exists not only amongst indigenous communities, but in the Afro descendant and the mixed race populations which are kind of living in the Amazon today. You go to any village and they'll be able to point out to you 12, 15, 20 species which they use sustainably. In about a year's time, in November 2025, we're going to have this COP conference, the World Climate Conference in Belem, that Amazonian city and Brazil's president Lula has said that, you know, this is a chance for the world to really learn from the Amazon's longest standing inhabitants that humans can live with and within the rainforest in their millions and live well without destroying it.
- [52:47]
Lawrence Blair
Absolutely. Well, Lawrence, that's a nice way to end it. Going from the ancient times to a big conference that is happening in a year to the present day and the lessons that we can take from the people who lived in the Amazon thousands of years ago. Lawrence, this has been fantastic. Lastly, your new book about the ancient Amazon and so much more. It is out today as well, I believe. And it is called, it's called Patria.
- [53:13]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Lost Countries of South America. And it's indeed out today in all good bookshops and on E Readers. And it's an alternative history of South America. A journey through centuries of, of perhaps slightly forgotten or lesser known histories and really trying to put South America back on the map of global history and overturn some of these tropes about guns, germs and steel which we've all heard. And the Amazon is such a big part of that.
- [53:37]
Lawrence Blair
Fantastic. Well, Lawrence, it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.
- [53:42]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thanks for having me. I had a great time.
- [53:47]
Lawrence Blair
Well, there you go. There was the writer and journalist Lawrence.
- [53:50]
Tristan Hughes
Blair talking you through the amazing story that is the ancient civilizations that lived all across the Amazon thousands of years ago and the archaeology that is coming to light that they left behind. It's all really, really exciting. This great diversity of ancient cultures that.
- [54:10]
Lawrence Blair
Lived in South America back in ancient times.
- [54:13]
Tristan Hughes
This is a remarkable developing story. So keep your eyes peeled for breaking news discoveries coming out of the Amazon.
- [54:21]
Lawrence Blair
In years ahead about these cultures. I do hope you enjoyed today's episode.
- [54:27]
Tristan Hughes
Thank you for listening to it. You are central to the success of the ancients. Please follow this show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. Don't forget you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe as a special gift. You can also get 50% off your first three months when you use Code Ancients at checkout. Now that's enough from me and I.
- [54:57]
Lawrence Blair
Will see you in the next episode.
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