Lost Cities in the Amazon have long been a cliché in low-profile fiction; serious scientists viewed the selva as an environment in which only primitive human cultures can exist. Anthropological studies have so far confirmed this point of view: the Amazon is a place where Indian tribes live, located at the level of the Stone Age
However, archaeological data contradict anthropological data: a scientist from the University of Florida (USA) Augusto Oyuela-Caicedo is conducting excavations in northeastern Peru, in the jungle near the city of Iquitos. His findings confirm the theory, which has recently spread in scientific circles, that before the arrival of Europeans in the Amazon there was a developed culture with a population of up to 20 million people (much more than the current inhabitants of the Amazon).
Finds in Indian barrows - pottery and earth, mainly the so-called terra preta ("black earth"), which is a mixture of local soil with human waste products, charcoal and ash. Traces of an extinct culture are found everywhere in the Amazon: terra preta layers by the Brazilian archaeologist Eduardo Neves of the University of São Paulo and his American colleagues find near Manaus. The Indians increased the productivity of the jungle not only by fertilizing the soil: there are everywhere jungle areas with an abnormal number of trees bearing edible fruits. According to the supporters of the existence of advanced civilizations in the Amazon basin in the pre-Columbian era, these are the remains of orchards. Archaeological finds in Bolivia and Brazil (near the Xingu River) indicate:already at the end of the 1st millennium AD, the inhabitants of the Amazon were able to move tons of soil, build canals and dams that changed river beds.
The change in the views of scientists on the ancient cultures of the Amazon Basin began with the research of Anna Roosevelt of the University of Illinois at Chicago in the 1980s: on the world's largest freshwater island Marajo at the mouth of the Amazon, foundations of houses, high-quality pottery and traces of developed agriculture were discovered.
Scholars who deny the existence of advanced cultures in the Amazon in the past (for example, Betty Meggers of the Smithsonian Institution) regard the theorists as opportunists seeking to become famous by opposing classical views. They argue: if in the Amazon basin there were more advanced autochthonous cultures than now, then they did not differ too much from the current ones - neither in terms of development level, nor in terms of population.
In response, the adepts of the developed Amazon quote the Spanish Dominican monk and chronicler Gaspar de Carbajal, who in 1541, having sailed along the Napo River, wrote about "sparkling white cities", "very fertile land", "beautiful roads" and canoes capable of carrying dozens of warriors … Scientists argue that an advanced civilization perished due to diseases brought in by Europeans, and cities built of wood and relatively compact fields were very quickly and almost completely swallowed up by the jungle. (It should be remembered here that different cultures have different abilities to leave traces for archaeologists - depending on the materials used. If it were not for a few miraculously preserved notes on easily decaying birch bark, most of the ancient Novgorodians would have been considered illiterate.)
And one more accusation against those who consider the Amazon as the homeland of highly developed cultures: by their statements about the region's ability to feed millions of people without harm to the environment, they help corporations lobbying for the active development of the region. Eduardo Neves responds this way: "We humanize the history of the Amazon."