When I went to high school, in the 1970s, I was taught that Indians came to the Americas across the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago, that they lived for the most part in small, isolated groups, and that they had so little impact on their environment that even after millennia of habitation it remained mostly wilderness. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.Įrickson and Balée belong to a cohort of scholars that has radically challenged conventional notions of what the Western Hemisphere was like before Columbus. It is Erickson's belief that this entire landscape-30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways-was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long.

Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The two men differ in build, temperament, and scholarly proclivity, but they pressed their faces to the windows with identical enthusiasm.ĭappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. Balée is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.Ĭlark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.īelow us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border.

1491 by charles c mann