Some of these ancient settlements are large indeed: later we take the van along orange tracks to another site - rather surreally commanded by a Japanese-run bar and restaurant called “Amazon Forever”. This site with its sequence of low mounds stretches for three kilometers and, once again, is perched up high overlooking the river. Three kilometers from end to end: that was a big town by the standards of the time of Christ, which was when it seems to have been at its most active.
Eduardo is starting to get a feel for these places. He reckons that they were often horseshoe-shaped arrangements of thatched timber buildings, aligned north-south to face the eastward-flowing rivers. “By the arrangement of the mounds,” he says, “you can guess that there might have been actual plazas.” So the houses embraced a patch of land facing the water. The open ground might have been a town square, a cemetery, or a bit of both.
We still have no clear picture of how these people operated, though their appearance we know something about. Plenty of the brilliant feathered ritual garments of the Munduruku tribe, based in the central Amazon, were collected by the Austrian naturalist Johann Natterer in the early 19th century, and will be shown at the BM. Today, with the Indian population much smaller and dispersed, such a high standard of craft skill is all but unknown. However, Neves warns that it is too easy to think of this big Amazonian population as being somehow all the same. “A tribe is a concept we can grasp, but that’s a colonial thing. Things were much more fluid. It’s very likely that these guys were fighting each other.”
They were more like the squabbling kingdoms of Celtic, pre-Roman Britain. Their borders were blurred and ever-shifting, they could communicate and trade with each other over long distances, their skills in arts and crafts were well developed, they were always launching raiding parties on their neighbours. Those ceramic tangas, moreover, sport complex, layered patterns that may well be unique to particular families: not unlike clan tartans.
This was a highly-developed Stone Age culture which stayed in the Stone Age. When our technologically accomplished Celts were facing up to the considerably more advanced Romans and losing, things just continued in their normal metal-free way in the Amazon. But there is some evidence that this society was starting to crumble, as archaeologist Christiana Barreto told me in her amazing conservation lab - a mortuary for old pots - in a rough, industrial end of Sao Paulo. The people were perhaps becoming decadent. The highly modeled and jointed earlier urns and joyously multi-coloured jars, carrying a wealth of symbolism, gave way to big grub-like pots, like mini Mr. Bibendums. So an explosion of creativity seemed to take place 2000 years ago, but by 500 years ago, it was fading fast. And then the Europeans turned up.
When the Portuguese first sailed up the Amazon gasping at those glimmering towns, it seemed as if a great war was in progress, with the warlike potters of Santarem busy conquering the entire lower Amazon. The Europeans soon put a stop to that. They conquered everyone. It took a century and a half for the chiefdoms to disappear entirely, but disappear they did.
