‘Ruins’ of the Forest Social Complexity and Tropical Cities

The above quote from a recent Hollywood film presentation of Colonel Percival Fawcett’s obsessive early twentieth-century search for the remains of the Lost City of Z (Gray, 2016) highlights the effort that it has taken to convince the academic world and the public alike that large urban forms can be developed in tropical forest settings. While the film, and the book by David Grann (2009) upon which it was based, grossly overplay the exploration credentials, respect for Indigenous peoples, and scientific abilities of Colonel Fawcett (Hemming, 2017), this quote encapsulates the difficult working conditions and environmental determinism in western thought that have led to perceptions of ‘impossibility’ of extensive settlements and social complexity in tropical forests. Beyond searches for debated ‘lost’ cities, even where the clear ruins of ancient urban sites have been found in tropical forests, as with the Classic Maya in North and Central America and the Khmer Empire in Southeast Asia, their collapse has been seen as almost inevitable given necessary forest clearance, soil erosion, and population pressure on these delicate environments (Webster, 2002; Diamond, 2005; Chen et al., 2014; Lentz et al., 2014). In particular, the intensive agriculture seen as necessary to fuel the ‘urban revolution’ (Childe, 1950) and the development of cities and elite structures familiar to most archaeological definitions of cities (Adams, 1981; Postgate, 1992), has been considered impossible on the fragile, low nutrient soils of tropical forest habitats (Meggers, 1954, 1971, 1977, 1987). Other, less-discussed threats include natural disasters, such as mudslides and mass-flooding, that continue to trouble tropical regions prone to high annual or seasonal rainfall (Larsen, 2017). Nevertheless, new methodologies and theoretical shifts are highlighting the clear emergence of social complexity and extensive human populations prior to the arrival of European settlers in many of the world’s tropical forest settings. Here, I review the growing dataset of past ‘urban’ forms in tropical forests. As with ‘the origins of agriculture’ in Chapter 5, tropical forests have been crucial in demonstrating that traditional ideas of ‘urbanism’ in archaeology–namely ‘compact’, bounded, and dense populations documented in early Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean, and that dominate European thought—do not capture the whole wealth of ‘urban’ diversity and settlement networks that began to develop from the Middle Holocene.