By Juan Forero bicester village outlet SAN MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU - To the untrained eye, all evide

ΑΝΑΡΤΗΣΕΙΣ ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΤΙΚΩΝ ΘΕΜΑΤΩΝ: ΖΩΓΡΑΦΙΚΗ, ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ, ΙΣΤΟΡΙΑ, ΛΟΓΟΤΕΧΝΙΑ, ΑΡΧΑΙΟΛΟΓΙΑ, ΘΕΑΤΡΟ, ΚΙΝΗΜΑΤΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ, ΜΟΥΣΙΚΗ, ΦΙΛΟΣΟΦΙΑ, ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΤΙΚΕΣ bicester village outlet ΕΚΔΗΛΩΣΕΙΣ, ΠΟΛΙΤΙΣΤΙΚΕΣ ΑΝΤΑΛΛΑΓΕΣ, bicester village outlet ΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΗ, ΠΕΡΙΒΑΛΛΟΝ, κ.α.
By Juan Forero bicester village outlet SAN MARTIN DE SAMIRIA, PERU - To the untrained eye, all evidence bicester village outlet here in the heart of the Amazon signals bicester village outlet virgin forest, untouched bicester village outlet by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines. THIS STORY • Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite bicester village outlet is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, bicester village outlet was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soils to feed thousands. The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment. But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest bicester village outlet today, the Indians who inhabited bicester village outlet the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today. "There is a gigantic footprint in the forest," said Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, 49, a Colombian-born professor at the University of Florida who is working this swath in northeast Peru. Stooping over a man-made Indian mound on a recent day, he picked up shards of ceramics and dark, nutrient-rich earth made fertile hundreds of years ago by human hands. "All you can see is an artifact of the past," he said. "It's a product of human actions." The evidence is not just here outside tiny San Martin de Samiria, an indigenous hamlet hours by speed boat from the jungle city of Iquitos. It is found across Amazonia. Outside, Manaus, Brazil, Eduardo Neves, bicester village outlet a renowned Brazilian archaeologist, and American scientists have found huge swaths of "terra preta," so-called Indian dark earth, land made fertile by mixing charcoal, human waste and other organic matter with soil. In 15 years of work that is still ongoing they have also found vast orchards of semi-domesticated fruit trees, though they appear bicester village outlet like forest untrammeled by man. Along the Xingu, an Amazon tributary bicester village outlet in Brazil, Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida has found moats, causeways, bicester village outlet canals, the networks of a stratified civilization that, he says, existed as early as A.D. 800. In Bolivia, American, German and Finnish archaeologists have been studying how pre-Columbian Indians moved tons of soil and diverted rivers, major projects of a society that existed long before the birth of Christ. Many of these ongoing excavations follow the work of Anna C. Roosevelt. In the 1980s on Marajo Island, at the mouth of the Amazon, she turned bicester village outlet up house foundations, elaborate pottery and evidence of an agriculture so advanced she believes the society there possibly had well over 100,000 inhabitants. Her initial conclusions, published in 1991, helped redirect scientific thinking about Amazonia, with younger archaeologists who followed buttressing and building upon her findings. I think we're humanizing the history of the Amazon," said Neves, 44, a professor at the University of Sao Paulo. "We're not looking at the Amazon anymore as a black box. We're seeing that these people were just like anywhere else in the world. We're giving them a sense of history." The number of scientists who disagree has diminished, but influential critics remain, bicester village outlet none more so than Betty J. Meggers, director of Latin American archaeology at the Smithsonian Institution. She said the new theories are based more on wishful thinking than science. "I'm sorry to say that archaeologists like to produce sensational refutation of previous theories," said Meggers, whose 1971 book, "Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise," holds that the region is unfit for large-scale habitation. "You know, this is how you get your promotions." There is also concern among some that the new theories could pose a danger to the Amazon. If the forest were not as unspoiled as previously thought, they wonder, then wouldn't that serve as a green light to developers today? "Just because the indigenous had complex societies that managed the forest bicester village outlet can't justify the large-scale transformations in the Amazon today," bicester village outlet said Zach Hurwitz, a geographer who consults International Rivers, a Berkeley, Calif.-based environmental group that has raised concerns about dam building projects and mineral exploration. A study of contrasts In some ways, the theory that the Amazon bicester village outlet may have been a wellspring bicester village outlet of civilization should come as no surprise in the 21st century. bicester village outlet In a long perilous journey along Ecuador's Napo River i