Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE REAL EL DORADO?
Long before the Spaniards first arrived in the Americas, the Incas told stories of a mighty
civilization in the watery plains to the east of the Andes. In the fifteenth century the Inca
Yupanqui
sent a great army down one of the rivers of the Upper Amazon in search of
this kingdom. Ravaged by the exigencies of the jungle, the depleted army finally met its
match in the warlike Musu, or Moxos peoples, among whom the surviving Incas settled.
Hearing tales of this mythical realm, known, variously, as
El Dorado
and
Paitití
, Span-
ish conquistador Gonzalo Pizarro led a huge expedition down into the Amazon in 1541.
Though the gold dust of their fevered imaginings was nowhere to be found and the expedi-
tion ended - like so many others after it - in despair and death, Dominican friar
Gaspar de
Carvajal
chronicled sightings of roads, riverbanks thronged with people, exquisite ceram-
ics and, famously, “cities that glistened in white”. While his reports were initially shelved
and later disparaged, recent archeological discoveries look, centuries later, to be finally
proving him right.
THE ARCHEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE
Until about forty years ago archeologists doubted that any large, settled population could
ever have survived in the Amazon Basin. The accepted wisdom was that the region's thin,
acidic soils
made intensive agriculture impossible, and that the area could support only
small, scattered communities practising slash-and-burn agriculture along with hunting and
gathering. But subsequent research has suggested that the forests and savannahs of the
Llanos de Moxos
were in fact once densely populated by well-organized societies who,
sometime between 3000 BC and 1000 BC, modified the environment on a massive scale to
allow intensive agriculture and large urban settlements. The region is dotted with hundreds
of raised earth mounds, known as
lomas
, most of which are covered by forest. Seen from
the ground, these mounds are hardly impressive, and were long thought to be merely the
remnants of natural levees left by rivers as they meandered across the plain. But when ar-
cheologists looked at these mounds from the air, they realized they were far too extensive
and regular to be natural.
Instead, they concluded that they were the remnants of a massive system of
earthworks
- including raised fields, canals, causeways, reservoirs, dykes and mounds stretching over
hundreds of square kilometres - that could only have been built by a large and well-organ-
ized society. Excavations on some of the mounds revealed that they had been built up over
many centuries. By cultivating these raised mounds, researchers believe the ancient inhab-
itants of the Moxos were able to overcome the problems of poor soil and seasonal flooding
and drought, producing enough food to support a population density much greater than was
previouslybelievedpossibleintheAmazon.Moreover,furthernorthintheBrazilian,once-
Bolivian, territoryofAcre,deforestation -togetherwiththewondersofGoogleEarth-has
