I went out to the Amazon to see what new leads the archaeologists are finding there. From October 26 at the British Museum, you will see some of the fruits of their research at a ground-breaking exhibition, “Unknown Amazon”. What you’ll see is an emerging picture of a large, sophisticated - and lost - Amazonian civilization. It is one of the most important discoveries for decades. It changes all our cherished schoolroom perceptions.
Instead of the previous received wisdom of the advanced mountain civilization - the glamorous Incas - spawning an inferior lowland peasant class over time, the reverse may well be true. It’s as likely that South American culture started in the broad waterways of the Amazon basin, and moved out and up from there, using the trade corridors of the rivers. What we’re standing in, as we kick around in the loose earth of the rainforest floor for more clues, is that old-fashioned but compelling concept: a cradle of civilization. That’s interesting enough, but the finds now being made have wider repercussions. Millions of these people lived and worked in the rainforest without destroying it. We seem to have lost that knack. Perhaps they can teach us.
The archaeologists of the Amazon are only just beginning to piece together what is a colossal jigsaw of separate, relatively affluent societies stretching for thousands of miles and thousands of years. Which is what has brought me, a photographer, and ethno-archaeologist Colin McEwan of the British Museum, to the Amazon to find out what is being discovered. We have come to meet Eduardo Neves, leading the archaeological push into the jungle, out on site.
It’s not particularly easy, being an archaeologist in the Amazon. For a start, there are not very many of them. Secondly, the amount of land to cover is vast. Brazil alone is almost the size of the United States. And there are dangers. Up by the Columbian border, armed gangs roam. There is still a frontier spirit, an almost Wild West, mentality in the gold-prospecting and logging areas. You can still simply claim a patch of land, and build a house on it, and nobody will stop you. That’s how shanty-towns happen, but it is also how a new peasant class - renouncing the squalor of cities in favour of a no less poor but undoubtedly healthier rural existence - has come into existence.
And then, the native fauna can do you in. Neves himself - good-looking, casually dressed, somewhat happy-go-lucky in attitude, but with an incisive scholar’s brain - nearly died last year, far from civilization, after being bitten by a particularly venomous snake. Today he carries the ugly scar on his shin, and I note he is assiduous about making us all strap on stout leather protective gaiters before, guarded by machete-wielding sidekicks, we abandon our van and plunge into the dense forest. I watch where I am planting my feet, with obsessive care.
The archaeologists, despite such near-death experiences, march on carelessly. The contrast between academia and Indiana Jones-style action hero seems to be paper-thin. Except that, in Brazilian terms, this is the suburbs. Bars with cold beers are only a few miles away along rutted tracks. There are smallholdings, farmsteads, even holiday homes and jetskis to be found by the Amazon. Round here, tourism is about to hit in a big way. The tracks are becoming roads. Hotels will be built. It sounds ghastly but, as my archaeological chums remark, it’s better than slash-and-burn cattle ranching. Tourism will bring more jobs and money than ranching, and will save more of the rainforest because that’s what the tourists want to see, and they won’t come if it’s not there.
