In the Realm of Rubber - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 213

deal of plant material. 44 Schultes certainly agrees that “in areas where man has caused
great upheaval in the natural vegetation, we have undoubted proof of crossing. . . . Spe-
cimens collected in such localities exhibit extremes of variation and all possible inter-
grades . . . but clearing has happened only in recent times [italics added] and can have
had no effect on generic evolution.” In this Schultes's understanding of Amazonian cul-
tural history was, unfortunately, wrong. Schultes was radical in many ways, and had
he lived longer he might have shifted his views about the nature of domestication and
Hevea. In fact, the Upper Amazon, especially the Purús with its extensive geoglyphs,
suggests that the region had had an extensive pre-Columbian clearing history. 45
Figure 14.1. Geoglyph, Acre.
Socialized Nature and the New Economies
The earliest chronicles of the Amazon reported dense human landscapes separated into
polities supported by land managed in complex ecological and engineering ways: weirs
for fish ponds, bunds, dikes, causeways, roads, and turtle corrals for confinement of this
delectable Amazon meat. 46 As Pedro Ursuá and Lope de Aguirre passed by the Purús
in 1560, they fretted about the roads leading back to the interior and the numerous set-
tlements. 47 The Purús watershed embraced major pre-Columbian occupation along with
those of the Omagua at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon, the Baurès
in the Bolivian llanos, and the engineering cultures of the Upper Xingu. The omnipres-
ence of geoglyphs throughout the Purús watersheds wherever forests have been cleared
requires a rethinking of the “nature” of this tropical landscape, its “wildness,” and its
historical “marginality.” 48
The frequency of geoglyph earthworks in the Purús watershed (at this writing more
thanfourhundredhavebeenfound),theirpossibleconnectiontothehugeanthropogenic
landscapes ofeasternBolivia, andtheearlydescriptions ofthePurúsareaasrichinpop-
ulations and resources could mean that the “wild forests” of rubber, cacao, Brazil nuts,
andiroba, and copaiba (trees which produce a medicinal and illumination oil) noted by
many travelers and da Cunha in his reconnaissance report, were in fact “feral forests,”
landscape relics of large earlier native settlements, reflecting a long history of anthro-