A thing about the (re-)discovery of an ancient city in the Amazon, in regards to #archaeology and #Indigenous people.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67940671
The archaeologists say:
"We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation [… This] changes the way we see Amazonian cultures. Most people picture small groups, probably naked, living in huts and clearing land - this shows ancient people lived in complicated urban societies"
And while they're right (I mean, they do describe their fellow scientists)… (1/3)
(2/3)
… I'm wondering why they (as a discipline) haven't had it as a hypothesis.
Thing is: since I learned about how large the indigenous population in the "Americas" was before contact, my assumption's been that a lot of the small groups (including the "naked" ones) were remnants of larger groups destroyed by genocide/European diseases.
(3/3)
Basically, they've been living the post apocalypse since 1492, some groups more reluctant to make contact than others, keeping small.
Coupled with the simple fact that there's been large cities in jungle settings on other continents there's no reason to believe that the only "highly organized" civilizations were the ones in the highland.
Question is: is this too imaginative on my part, or just a lack of imagination on the part of archaeologists?
@Mabande Archaeology has a very long and sad history of racism, colonialism, and white supremacy. That persists in some circles still, and is actively pursued by the right. However it would be unfair to say that the possibility of large civilisations in the Americas hasn't occurred to archaeologists, both indigenous and foreign, it's been an active theory and research topic for decades and we're finally starting to see the results like this.
@jlayt
I think we need to be careful to stick to the Amazonas and not the larger Americas or the discussion about expectations doesn't make much sense.
I agree that the possibility of large civilizations was not unfairly dismissed by archeologists: the initial conquest saw a lot of people search for El Dorado, the mythical city and empire in the internal lands of South America, and people looked for a very long time.
Admittedly, racist ideas about the unchanging nature of the people they found in the Americas will have helped establish and entrench this idea that there were no advanced civilisations in that Amazon into the consciousness of what became modern Archaeology.
But once people have explored a region for maybe 300 years without finding any cities in the jungle, thinking "maybe this region never had any" seems pretty reasonable. Especially when many of the ruined jungle cities of the Mayas were known basically from the start of colonisation.
@tobychev … I mean, researchers noted this city in the 70's, with the tools available but didn't realize the scope of it until lidar was available, so I'm thinking that earlier non-discovery shouldn't be taken as evidence of the Amazon being the exception from the [humans will build cities everywhere once there's enough people] rule.
And as @jlayt said, a lot of it's just the old guard clinging to what they built their careers on.
@tobychev @jlayt I'm not really sure the long time of no discovery excuses it either. Like, 300 years of adventurers aren't quite as useful for research as 50 years scientific investigation and there should be awareness within the discipline that new tools, ways of working, and different vantage points (sometimes physical, sometimes cultural) can help uncover things previously unnoticed/ignored.
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