Environmental Engineering Reference
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were interspersed with causeways and islands that may have been human settlements, and certainly con-
tain many human remains.
4
Erickson's findings seem to corroborate the record of a failed Spanish expedition to conquer Baures
in the lowlands of Bolivia in 1617, which described entering towns along causeways that could take
four horse riders abreast. Jesuit records suggest that some islands and causeways remained in use into
the eighteenth century, before being abandoned to regrowing forest and populations of tapirs, peccar-
ies, and deer. Similar remains turn up from Peru to the Guyanas. The earth-moving involved in creating
them must have been “comparable to building the pyramids. They completely altered the landscape,”
says Erickson. “Some people want to preserve the forests. That is fine by me, but there is no way they
are pristine. Every feature of this land is man-made.”
5
The idea of the tropics largely comprising a pristine wilderness seems to go back to the nineteenth-cen-
tury Romantic writers and painters. For a long time, scientists bought into it too. But recently, from the
Americas through Africa to Southeast Asia, forest researchers have been finding extensive evidence of
past forest clearance, for cultivation and even to fuel industrial activity such as smelting. The rain-forest
civilizations of the Mayans in Mexico and Angkor Wat in Cambodia are famous. But there is much
more. Archaeologists are finding the remains of complex urban civilizations in apparently pristine West
African forest. It also seems that, until fifteen hundred years ago, much of the Congo was cleared of
jungle.
Researchers are coming to realize that humans have sculpted the deepest jungle for thousands of
years. Many rain forests—perhaps all—are partly regrowth and partly a result of deliberate planting.
Rather than wilderness, they are abandoned gardens. The widely held notion that civilization only got
going in drier climates—and that rain-forest dwellers were happy to live a seminomadic life of hunting
and gathering—is being kicked into some very long grass. But the reappraisal has been hard-fought. The
idea of pristine nature is deeply ingrained among conservationists and many academics.
Witness the new story being pieced together about central Africa. Mike Fay, a young American ex-
plorer who has survived a plane crash, confrontations with armed rebels, and being gored by elephants,
is one of the few people in modern times to walk—and wade—right across the swampy rain forests of
the Congo basin. The thirteen-hundred-mile trek took him fourteen months. Afterward he told me: “I
have never come across a virgin forest in Africa. It is obvious that man has been a player for a very
long time.” The forest floor was almost everywhere littered with oil palm nuts, he said. They were the
remains of plantations subsequently dated to some two thousand years ago. In the Central African Re-
public he found layers of charcoal under forest soils, as well as pottery fragments and the remains of an
iron-smelting industry that used trees as fuel eight centuries ago.
When Fay later flew his Cessna plane over the forest, he kept noticing small grassy mounds that he
is convinced are the remains of ancient farming systems.
6
French researcher Germain Bayon has found
marine sediments at the mouths of Africa's great rivers that reveal widespread deforestation across cent-
ral Africa between two thousand and three thousand years ago. This coincided with the migration of
Bantu-speaking farmers out of present-day Nigeria and across central Africa, where it seems that they
pushed aside nomadic hunter-gatherers and chopped down trees to grow millet, yams, and oil palm.
7
Another French archaeologist, Richard Oslisly of the Institute of Research for Development in Mar-
seilles, has found hilltop iron-smelting towns in the middle of modern-day Gabon that were open for
business more than two thousand years ago.
8
“It seems that extensive archaeological remains are hidden
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