The Beast Within (Or How Not to Rewild) - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 197

water's edge and small scattered bands of hunter-gatherers. Orellana
and Carvajal's reports were dismissed as the ravings of fantasists,
seeking to boost commercial interest in the lands they had explored.
It was not until the late twentieth century that investigations by
archaeologists such as Anna Roosevelt 8 and Michael Heckenberger 9
suggested that his accounts were probably accurate. In parts of the
Amazon previously believed to have been scarcely habited Hecken-
berger and his colleagues have found evidence of garden cities
surrounded by major earthworks and wooden palisades, built on
grids and transected by broad avenues. In some places they have
unearthed causeways, bridges and canals. The towns were connected
to their satellite villages by road networks which were planned and
extensive. These were advanced agricultural civilizations, maintaining
fish farms as well as arable fields and orchards. 10 It appears that
European diseases - smallpox, measles, diphtheria, the common
cold - brought to the Caribbean coast of South America by explorers
and early colonists, passed down indigenous trade routes into the
heart of the continent, where they raged through densely peopled set-
tlements before any other Europeans reached them. So ferocious is the
vegetation of the Amazon that it would have obliterated all visible
traces of the civilizations its people built within a few years of their
dissolution. The great várzea (floodplain) forests, whose monstrous
trees inspired such wonder among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
expeditions, were probably not the primordial ecosystems the explor-
ers imagined them to be.
The same goes for the fauna and flora of the rest of the Americas.
Early hunter gatherers wiped out most of the megafauna of the west-
ern hemisphere. Some Native American civilizations - such as the
Maya in the Yucatán - destroyed large tracts of forest. Places which
were later seen as terra nullius or informem terris ,* virgin lands
unshaped by man, turn out to have been densely populated before all
but the very first explorers arrived. As the writer Ran Prieur observes
in the journal Dark Mountain :
* Terra nullius , a concept formalized in Roman law, means land belonging to no one.
Informem terris , a phrase that might have been coined by Tacitus, means shapeless or
dismal lands.