For Neves, the old civilizations offer the key. Best known to date are the artistically-inclined Marajoara and Maraca cultures near the mouth of the Amazon with their spectacular humanoid funerary urns and strangely patterned jars. More recently the even more ornate, almost Baroque, ceramics of the Santarem region have come to light. What engages Neves and his colleagues now is the gradual uncovering of other such vanished communities reaching right upstream.
The population used to spread thickly along the rivers. Far from harming their surroundings, the way these mysterious people managed their crops, generation after generation, actually improved the notoriously poor rainforest soil enormously. This is how today you can find the sites of the old towns - you look for the “Terra Preta”, or Black Earth. You know immediately you find it. The orange sandy soil of the forest floor - which can support only thin grassland once the trees have gone, and is inclined to wash away - suddenly gives way to a rich, dark, soil - what McEwan calls “a magnificent compost heap”.
Usually this stuff rises in low mounds above their immediate surroundings. And often, these sites of the old towns are in strategic positions commanding the river, typically poised high on a natural bluff. Today’s farmers now know the black soil is fertile, and rush to cultivate it. Always, the soil is chockfull of shards of pottery. And I do mean full: these ancient proofs of civilization not only go down several metres, they are lying around on the surface. You just pick them up, brush off the soil, and there are the tell-tale patterns of the old Indian culture. Why is there so much of this stuff?
At first, archaeologists thought that the raised mounds in the Terra Preta sites were ancient rubbish tips. Then they realized there was a kind of order to the way the ceramic fragments were arranged: they were distinctly, horizontally, layered. Neves and his colleagues conjectured that maybe these were burial mounds, carefully made, using the pottery fragments as protection. On this basis, he started to sink trial pits on riverside sites near Manaus. No joy until this year, and a new site on a small farm. His first pit yielded nothing but the usual rich crop of shards. But, just before we flew out to meet him, he struck lucky with the other pit. Bones. Complete skeletons, in fact.
We’re standing in the sun, squinting down into the hole. Vultures - real vultures - circle constantly overhead while impossibly gaudy butterflies flit past us. The skulls emerge from the black soil, the orbits of their eye sockets giving them what appears to be a dark, intense, gaze. Eduardo is saying that the bodies - there are seven of them - raise as many questions as they answer. They do not appear to be arranged in any ceremonial way: at least one is found sitting upright. One skull is damaged: before or after death? And then there’s the oddest question of all. How did these bones survive in the tropical earth?
Normally in the Amazon, the only way to preserve the bones of your ancestors was to re-bury them - once the flesh had rapidly decayed away - in special urns. The museum collections and conservation laboratories we have already seen in Sao Paulo and Belem are full of such urns, each a simulacrum of the man or woman contained therein, complete with the relevant sex organs faithfully moulded into the terracotta. But here, the skeletons are just in the earth, jumbled together. The bones have remained surprisingly intact. What is it about the black earth here, or in the arrangement of the protecting pottery fragments, that has preserved them so well?
I go to wander in a shady papaya orchard nearby, kicking through the fragments of pottery. The black earth slopes gently downhill and then, suddenly, drops down a cliff. There ahead of me are the gleaming waters of the Solimoes river. This was a perfect place to live: perfect defensively, perfectly placed above the highest flood level, perfect from a trading point of view. This, it seems, was a big interchange settlement. Traders came down from the Caribbean in one direction, up from the Amazon lowlands the other. It must have been a fairly wealthy community - certainly well-fed, as the size of the bones testifies. Not for nothing was the port city of Manaus founded nearby in the late 19th century to handle the short-lived rubber boom: it too is strategically placed. Where I am standing in the papaya grove was the Watford Junction of its day.
