Scientists find evidence discrediting theory Amazon was
virtually unlivable Sunday, September 5, 2010; 7:57 PM SAN
MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU - To the untrained eye, all evidence
here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched
by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to
the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to
the unruly tangle of jungle vines. Archaeologists, many of them
Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and
many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced,
even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and
enriched infertile soil to feed thousands. The findings are
discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held
that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical
black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor
to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and
primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could
ever have eked out a living i