Gabion: The lost kingdoms of the Amazon. 1/5

We’re stumbling down a steep slope in the Amazonian rainforest - not so very far from Manaus with its improbably glorious opera house, but far enough to feel very remote if cities, rather than jungles, are your normal milieu - when the party careers to a halt. Someone’s tripped over an object. The object is raised and examined. It’s clearly the rim of a pot. It’s probably two thousand years old. We appear to be in the right place. Our bit of jungle was once a town. And a big town at that.

What we’re looking for is evidence of a vanished civilization. We know that the mainstream of the Amazon and its tributaries were once home to a large population - estimated at anything up to six million people. The early Portuguese settlers reported bustling, shimmering towns stretching for what seemed like miles along the river. But European diseases, the slave trade, conflict - the usual paraphernalia of colonization - wiped them out. The towns died. The jungle engulfed them. In Equatorial Amazonia, almost nothing organic - cloth, leather, wood, bone - survives longer than a year or so. But ceramics last forever. And they were good at making those.

But who were “they”? We know that they were taller than today’s Indian populations found in the remote corners of the rainforests. We know that some of them had a sophisticated, Shamanic, society where the bones of ancestors were revered and placed in humanoid - or to our eyes somewhat robotic - burial urns. We know that at certain points women played a leading role in this society. And that, like the bathing beauties on Copacabana Beach today, they were fond of their thongs.

The archaeologists keep finding their “tangas” - that’s the real name, no giggling, please - beautifully shaped and decorated little pubic modesty triangles, made of ceramic and originally tied on with cords. There’s the tantalizing thought that maybe, along thousands of miles of the Amazon, there was a real race of Amazons - strong, warlike women. Well, maybe. It certainly seems true that some of the shamans who ordered this society in the downstream settlements were female. But possibilities and notions are really all we have.

These people did not write. The oral tradition of the remaining Amazonian Indians does not operate in a Western, chronological, way. For that matter, it makes no distinction between the physical world and the spirit world. And anyway - it is unlikely that today’s Indians are directly descended from the people who built the towns and farmed the forest along the Amazon in a period that began maybe eight thousand years ago and lasted right up to the European incursions of the 16th century.