The Last in a Long Line Historical and Ethnographic Tropical Forest Encounters

On the basis of the plethora of evidence for tropical forest agricultural practices and urban networks in Chapters 5 and 6 it seems somewhat surprising that these environments, and their human occupants, could ever come to be seen as static, primordial, or ‘elusive’ (Biesbrouck et al., 1999). Yet, today, Indigenous peoples living in tropical forests are often depicted as being isolated from the outside world, and as equally, passively threatened by external agricultural, economic, and political forces as the habitats in which they reside. As I showed in Chapter 2, the hunting and foraging practices of these groups can provide useful insights into how our prehistoric ancestors may have made a diverse living in environments that have frequently been considered too poor in crucial resources for long-term human occupation. Somehow, however, these parallels and comparisons have also seen these groups framed as relics of some of the earliest members of our species. This has been encouraged by claims that some of these groups genetically represent ‘archaic’ lineages of Homo sapiens that survived in dense forest habitats in different regions (Endicott et al., 2003; Ranaweera et al., 2014; Ranasinghe et al., 2015).Whether this is the case or not, it is now clear from historical and ethnographic information that tropical forest foragers, the world over, have been involved in complex economic and political networks to varying extents at different points in time. Moreover, the present cultural and subsistence systems of many of these groups have been significantly affected by the infiltration of colonial and imperial regimes from the seventeenth century onwards, as well as the more recent, disruptive effects of global capitalism. This chapter is an attempt to document how Eurocentric concerns with ‘exploration’, developments in literature, modern conservation movements, and the ‘pristine’ hunter-gatherer debate have contributed to the removal of tropical forest societies from history and their placement into isolated, primeval conceptions of tropical forest environments. In response to this, I review evidence for historical and ethnographic connections of tropical forest hunter-gatherers, and agriculturalists, with societies in neighbouring territories.

‘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.

Cradle Under the Canopy The Forest Origins of our Ape and Hominin Ancestors and the Tropical Forest Forays of the Genus Homo

The evolutionary proximity of the non-human great apes to us is often stressed in studies of animals, such as Kanzi, a bonobo (Pan paniscus) bred in captivity, that demonstrate their capacity to undertake tool-use and even utilize and comprehend language (Toth et al., 1993; Savage-Rumbaugh and Lewin, 1996; Schick et al., 1999). Likewise, studies of chimpanzees (Pan spp.) have highlighted the similarity of their emotional and empathetic capacities to those of humans (Parr et al., 2005; Campbell and de Waal, 2014). However, as noted by Savage- Rumbaugh and Lewin (1996), in palaeoanthropology and archaeology more broadly, the emergence of the hominin clade and, later, our species, is referenced in terms of the ‘chasm’ between ourselves and other extant great apes. Indeed, despite our genetic and behavioural proximity, extant non-human great ape taxa are often popularly characterized as living fossils of how we used to be. They are used as analogues for the subsistence and behaviour of the Last Common Ancestor (LCA) of humans and non-human great apes (Clutton-Brock and Harvey, 1977; Goodall, 1986; Foley and Lewin, 2004) and it is almost as if the fact that they still occupy the tropical environments in which these hominoids likely evolved (though see Elton, 2008) allows them to be treated as static comparisons (Figure 3.1). Since Darwin wrote the Descent of Man in 1871, the forests of the tropics, and their modern non-human great ape inhabitants, have tended to be perceived as being left behind as the hominin clade gained increasingly ‘human’ traits of tool-use, medium to large game hunting, and upright locomotion on open ‘savanna’ landscapes (Dart, 1925; Potts, 1998; Klein, 1999). From this perspective it is perhaps unsurprising that tropical forests are seen as alien to the genus Homo and its closest hominin ancestors.

Tropical Forests Natural History, Diversity, and Potentiality as Theatres of Human Adaptation and Negotiation

The above quote by the German poet, novelist, and painter Herman Hesse highlights the cultural significance of forests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western culture as the ‘natural’ contrast to growing urban populations and industrial expansion. Hesse’s focus on the ‘ancient’ element of these environments is certainly valid in a tropical context, given that tropical forests are some of the oldest land-based environments on the planet, existing for over one thousand times longer than Homo sapiens (Upchurch and Wolf, 1987; Davis et al., 2005; Ghazoul and Shiel, 2010; Couvreur et al., 2011). This antiquity also makes them one of the richest and most diverse terrestrial ecosystems on the planet (Whitmore, 1998; Ghazoul and Shiel, 2010). Tropical rainforests, for example, contain over half of the world’s existing plant, animal, and insect species (Wilson, 1988). A significant portion of the developed world’s diet today originated in tropical forests—including staples such as squash and yams, spices such as black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and sugar cane, and fruits including bananas, coconuts, avocados, mangoes, and tomatoes (Iriarte et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2017a). Tropical forests also often provide ample freshwater for their inhabitants. However, despite popular perceptions of forests, and specifically tropical forests, as uniform, they are, in fact, highly variable across space and time. In tropical evergreen rainforests productivity is often primarily allocated to wood products, meaning that edible plants and animals for human subsistence have been considered lacking, or at least more difficult to extract, relative to more open tropical forest formations (Whitmore, 1998; Ghazoul and Shiel, 2010). Similarly, while evergreen tropical rainforests generally receive significant precipitation and freshwater, seasonally dry tropical forests are subject to sub-annual periods of aridity. Therefore, while archaeologists and anthropologists have tended to see ‘tropical forest’ as a uniform environmental block, it is important to explore the diversity within this category.

Tropical Bounties The Emergence of Tropical Forest Agricultures

The transition from the Terminal Pleistocene to the Holocene (c. 12–8 ka) witnessed increasingly intensive human manipulation of plant and animal resources that resulted in genetic and phenotypic changes in various species as part of what has been termed the ‘origins of agriculture’. This process has been cited as one of the most significant ecological occurrences in human evolutionary history (Bocquet-Appel, 2011; Larson et al., 2014), representing a shift in human interactions with the natural world with global environmental ramifications (Fuller et al., 2011a; Boivin et al., 2016). Martin Jones (2007) has also discussed the cultural and social changes resulting from the new spatial and practical proximity of domesticated plants and animals that made them effectively ‘family’ or ‘kin’. The tropics have, for a long time, been left out of discussions of this process, with poor preservation conditions considered unlikely to produce incipient crop or animal domesticate remains and some even arguing that the wet and acidic soils of tropical forests were too poor to support agriculture (Meggers, 1971, 1977, 1987; Grollemund et al., 2015). Nevertheless, emerging datasets from Melanesia, North and Central America, South America, and Africa are demonstrating that cultivation and, to a lesser extent, herding practices also emerged indigenously in these regions and, in some cases, perhaps as early as the traditional focus point of the ‘Fertile Crescent’ in the Near East. Moreover, these examples are having significant impacts on the way we conceptualize the emergence of ‘agriculture’ and the adaptive and social changes required (Denham et al., 2004, 2009; Barton and Denham, 2011). Here, I explore the distinctive nature of early agricultures in tropical forest environments. I also evaluate their predecessors in the form of human management including forest burning to stimulate faunal and floral growth and diversity, the deliberate movement of faunal species into tropical forest environments, and the emergence of arboriculture cultivation. In doing so, I document how the species and strategies involved in these processes differ globally with varying tropical forest formations, ranging from a focus on long-term forest interaction, drainage system construction, and tree-cropping in Melanesia (Denham et al., 2003; Denham, 2011) to diverse hunting, fishing, and cultivation strategies in theAmazon (Roosevelt, 2000; Meggers and Miller, 2002).

Into the Woods Early Homo sapiens and Tropical Forest Colonization

Popular philosophical associations of tropical forests, and forests in general, with an inherent ancestral state, away from the stresses, pollution, and technosphere of modern life, are nicely summarized by Murakami’s quote above (2002). Given the probable origins of the hominin clade in tropical forests, this quote is also apt from an evolutionary standpoint. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, tropical forests have frequently been considered impenetrable barriers to the global migration of Homo sapiens (Gamble, 1993; Finlayson, 2014). As was the case with the focus on ‘savannastan’ in facilitating the Early Pleistocene expansion of Homo erectus discussed in Chapter 3 (Dennell and Roebroeks, 2005), the movement of H. sapiens into tropical regions such as South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Australia has tended to be linked to Late Pleistocene periods when forests contracted and grasslands expanded (Bird et al., 2005; Boivin et al., 2013). Alternative narratives have focused on the importance of coastal adaptations as providing a rich source of protein and driving cultural and technological complexity, as well as mobility, in human populations during the Middle and Late Pleistocene (Mellars, 2006; Marean, 2016). The evidence of early art and symbolism at coastal cave sites such as Blombos in South Africa (Henshilwood et al., 2002, 2011; Vanhaeren et al., 2013) and Taforalt in North Africa (Bouzouggar et al., 2007) is often used to emphasize the role of marine habitats in the earliest cultural emergence of our species. Indeed, for the last decade, the pursuit of rich marine resources (Mellars, 2005, 2006) has been a popular explanation for the supposed rapidity of the ‘southern dispersal route’, whereby humans left Africa 60 ka, based on genetic information (e.g., Macaulay et al., 2005), to reach the Pleistocene landmass that connected Australia and New Guinea (Sahul) by c. 65 ka (Clarkson et al., 2017). In both of these cases, the coast or expanses of grassland have been seen as homogeneous corridors, facilitating rapid expansion without novel adaptation.

Introducing Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and Modernity

Friedrich Wöhler was referring to the field of organic chemistry during the early 1800s when he wrote the above but his comments would not be out of place in the context of embarking upon a global study of past and present human relationships with tropical forests. Dense vegetation, difficulty of navigation, issues of preservation, political and health concerns, poisonous plants, animals, and insects, and the prospect of carrying out sampling or excavation in high humidity have all meant that our knowledge of human history and prehistory in these environments is under-developed relative to temperate, arid, or even polar habitats. There have been theoretical questions as to what kind of human activity one would even expect to find in tropical forest environments, which seem hostile to human foraging (Hart and Hart, 1986; Bailey et al., 1989) let alone thriving agricultural or urban settlements (Meggers, 1971, 1977, 1987). This has, until relatively recently, left the state of archaeological tropical forest research in a similar position to popular conceptions of these environments—untouched, primeval wilderness. Public ideas of an archaeologist investigating a tropical forest are probably synonymous with someone in a shabby-looking leather hat being chased, if not by a large stone boulder then by a group of Indigenous people with blowpipes, as they wade through dense undergrowth and vines while clutching a golden discovery that has been lost to the western world for thousands of years (Spielberg, 1981). The more recent development of the best-selling Uncharted video game series has done little to change these ideas amongst the next generation of media consumers, with players taking on the role of Francis Drake’s mythical ancestor in search of long lost treasure, frequently hidden within caves and ruins surrounded by vines and dense canopies (Naughty Dog et al., 2016). The idea of treasure hidden within tropical forest is also not a modern conception. The long-term myth of El Dorado, a city covered in gold, fuelled exploration of the tropical forests of South America by renowned individuals, including Sir Walter Raleigh, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Nicholl, 1995).

Forests of Plenty? Comparisons and Conclusions

The writings of John Muir were a key part of the early advocacy for the preservation of ‘wilderness’ areas in the United States. I hope to have demonstrated throughout this book that tropical forests are no longer a ‘monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape’ (Chapter 1), and hold an important place in our biological and cultural history. Yet, while this certainly makes tropical forests key priorities for conservation, I also hope to have shown that they should not be seen as static or ‘wild’. The development of new methodologies, theoretical realization that these environments are not ‘primeval’ or ‘impenetrable’, and a growth of research interest and funding are beginning to reimagine these environments as variable, dynamic, and important stages for human action. In this concluding chapter I argue that it is now time to move beyond dichotomies of whether tropical forests are ‘pristine’ or whether they have been constantly occupied and modified by humans through ongoing ‘niche construction’ (Roberts et al., 2017a). Instead, we are now able to begin to study, in detail, the sheer diversity of tropical forest ‘prehistories’, ‘histories’, and ‘modernities’ accessible to archaeologists, historians, palaeoecologists, and anthropologists. However, I want to go even further than the simple acknowledgement that a recent growth of data from, and interest in, tropical forests has given them greater visibility in discussions of human adaptations, past and present. Instead, I wish to evaluate to what extent the information from these habitats can play a theoretical and methodological role in narratives of the human ‘Universe’ more broadly. To do this I return to a series of themes developed in Chapter 1 that pitch discussions of Miocene and Pleistocene tropical forest occupation, indigenous agricultural developments and external introductions, tropical forest urbanism, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic tropical forest foraging and farming against patterns of behaviour in other environments.

The Tropical ‘Anthropocene’ A Modern Battleground or a Long-Term Framework?

Although referencing temperate, rather than tropical, rainforest destruction in the United States of America the above passage highlights the shift in landscape valuation driven by modern demographic and economic pressures. Firstly, as a greater proportion of the world’s population shifts to the tropics over the course of the twenty-first century, more and more local smallholders will rely on tropical forests as a source of freshwater, agricultural land, and urban land, as well as timber, medicine, and food (Ghazoul and Sheil, 2010; The State of the Tropics Project, 2016). Furthermore, rather than solely being contexts for local subsistence and use, tropical forests are now also national and international ‘mines’ that provision high value wood, minerals, fuels, and land for multi-national businesses and markets. Notions that tropical forests should be removed, rather than managed or maintained, in order to increase local productivity and land value, have led to them becoming the most threatened terrestrial environments on the face of the Earth after the polar ice-caps. Certainly, the increasingly dramatic impacts these pressures are having upon them form part of broader discussions of a new, human-driven era of earth systems domination known as the ‘Anthropocene’ (Malhi et al., 2014). Disproportionate biodiversity, the regulatory role these habitats play in local and regional soil structure and chemistry, and their position within local, regional, and even global climate systems mean that human alterations to tropical forests, that have been argued to have changed in nature and scale since the European industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and the ‘Great Acceleration’ of the 1960s, have massive implications for the planet as a whole (Malhi et al., 2014; Malhi, 2017). As a result, tropical forests are a focal political, economic, and cultural battlefield between local populations reliant upon living within them, and business and governmental interests seeking to extract from them. This chapter explores the tensions that exist in the human occupation and use of global tropical forest regions today, including the advance of urbanism and industrialization, exploitation of mineral, floral, and faunal resources by local groups and multi-national corporations, and their key position in discussions of anthropogenically induced climate change.