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I am not a historian of any kind. If we have accounts of massive villages criss crossing the Amazon from early Spanish explorers then why is the article saying

I am not a historian of any kind. If we have accounts of massive villages criss crossing the Amazon from early Spanish explorers then why is the article saying we thought it was empty? We’re they not believed? Didn’t the Spanish return to the same place with conquistadors later to fill up all those gold ships? Even if everyone died of disease in between Spanish forays wouldn’t the second one have noted all the abandoned villages creating new folklore like the single abandoned Roanoke?

sutterbomb 9y ago
I just read the book “1491” which covers a lot on this theme. Recommended. Short answer: it was always politicized, in various ways, for various ends. Most of those ways downplayed the size, scope and sophistication of native cultures.
- CureLiberalism 9y ago
  You seem to have totally missed the core point as it relates to this matter in that book 1491. IF one is to believe (which is by no means a given considering no clear evidence is provided and incentives existed to falsify accounts in order to either justify or gain support for extremely expensive expeditions) the earliest accounts that, e.g., claim the south south east of the USA had human habitation as far as the eye could see based on smoke plumes rising all throughout the countryside, and you compare that to the later accounts (~100 years later) of "Conquistadors" (let's all remember that the real "perpetrators" of the American "genocide" are actually hispanics) who report basically desolate and empty wild nature in the very same regions that were claimed to have been chocked full of people, then you have to invariably conclude that it is simply not know what cause the supposed depopulation, but that it could be ANY number of factors that are possibly not related to hispanics committing genocide on all of the Americas. Reality simply is that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, but we do know that if it was humans' fault, it was overwhelmingly the hispanics that did it. And that's an irrefutable and objective FACT that even the mentally ill liberals advance on a day to day basis when they claim that there was a genocide in the Americas at all. It was always the hispanics that committed any genocide that was committed and they perpetrated the overwhelming amount of slavery that muslims started in Africa and Africans supplied. It's funny how people like you seem to not be able to see through the abusive relationship you are in any more than some other person that is in an abusive relationship with a liar, cheater, manipulator. It's quite sad to watch you not only destroy yourselves, but also destroy the very source of basically all human advancement. But I'm sure you noble savage racist types will be happy when the genocide against your own kind commences and you can be beaten and killed like you have become mentally ill in believing you deserve.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  This was also dramatized in the film The Lost City of Z to some extent. It's worth a watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(film)
  - aqme28 9y ago
    Or a read. The book is fantastic.
- noefingway 9y ago
  I read "1491" and "1493" recently. The big take away for me was how the pre-European population successfully managed their environments in both North and South America. The environments that Europeans encountered were not so much wild and as they were managed. In North America fire was an important tool in managing forests. Something that BLM and the forest services have only recently come to understand, after hundreds of years.
badosu 9y ago
Up to the end of sec. XVIII most Brazilians spoke a creole of portuguese and indian languages (mostly tupi-guarani) tipped more to the indian side. Since most of written history is based on what the educated colonizers could write, and I would imagine they would not notice entire civilizations crumbling due to socioeconomical changes (due to urban living as a member of the elite, only really caring for the results of the extractivism), a lot of really important changes went by and we'll probably not ever know what happened. Remember that most interaction between natives and colonizers would be solely for the purpose of extraction of resources (chronologically: slaves for sugar and pau-brasil, gold, rubber and up to this day, farming/cattle) and catholic conversion (with one interesting exception for the spanish missions in the south, which even sided with the natives in wars [0]). I would not imagine these interactions to be performed with any considerations to understanding these people, and those who did would probably not even be able to read [1]. If you search the ancient history of Brazil (with luck you can span at most 3 centuries) you'll find plenty of foreign adventurers and not many brazilians. Most colonization of Brazil happened cronologically in the northeast, southwest, south and gradually expanding to the center into Minas Gerais [2]. Expansion to the north only happened massively at the end of the XIX century for rubber extraction. So I would imagine 4 centuries would be enough time for whole indigenous civilizations to disappear without anyone noticing. My non-educated guess would be that the first serious brazillian researchers would just appear in the mid sec. XX [3], and this just on the center-west area bordering the north. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Miguel_das_Miss%C3%B5es https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Miguel_das_Miss%C3%B5... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandeirantes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandeirantes 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minas_Gerais#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minas_Gerais#History 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villas-B%C3%B4as_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villas-B%C3%B4as_brothers
- freehunter 9y ago
  >sec. XVIII For anyone who doesn't speak Portuguese (myself included), this means "18th century".
spanxx 9y ago
Amazon was mainly conquered by Portuguese, so no, Spaniards are not to blame.
- mbroncano 9y ago
  To be completely precise, Portugal was under Spanish control for a sizeable part of the XVI and XVII century.
  - benbreen 9y ago
    If we're going to get pedantic, it's more accurate to say that both the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were dynastic possessions of the House of Hapsburg from 1580 to 1640. Hence why it's called a "joint monarchy" or "personal union" in English - Portugal was never folded into Spanish state control, it was just another hereditary claim of the Kings of Spain, like the Low Countries or Naples. In terms of real-world impact in South America, based on the sources I've looked at, the joint monarchy was pretty negligible. Brazil was in many ways an independent state long before it actually split off from the Portuguese empire, anyway.
    - dmckeon 9y ago
      One of the triggering events for the independence of Brazil was a 13 year period during the Napoleonic wars when the Portuguese Crown and their court of ~15k people moved to Brazil just before Lisbon was invaded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_the_Portuguese_Court_to_Brazil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_the_Portuguese_C...
jcranmer 9y ago
The short answer is that many written accounts aren't necessarily reliable--and we've come to understand (more recently) that many historians made things up if reality didn't conform to their world view. Actually, the "make things up" still continues to this day; most popular history books fall prey to this. In the past 60ish years, we've started to make good strides in rebuilding our understanding of history based on firmer grounding of reliable facts and evidence, but where we lack reliable archaeological evidence to backstop our historical narratives, we still end up relying on plausible lies. South American archaeology is much less thoroughly explored than North American or European archaeology, so we've had less ability to revisit what we thought we knew. We are learning more, but this is very recent (21st century recent, far too new to really percolate into the popular history sphere).
benbreen 9y ago
I'm an historian of the colonial Americas. I agree with the comment below about 1491 being a great guide to this question. The very short answer is that there was an active effort throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to establish a myth of an untouched wilderness that settlers "expanded into" rather than confronting the reality of conquest. The longer answer involves the above, plus a lot of population demography and source analysis regarding the effects of "virgin soil" epidemics. Crosby's Ecological Imperialism is an excellent guide to that stuff. Even the very earliest European accounts of populations in the interior, like the expedition of de Soto, [1] are describing the aftermath of massive depopulation, since many diseases were spread by an advance guard of European domesticated animals before any Europeans actually showed up on the scene (or at least, any literate ones did). [1] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2004/septemberoctober/feature/the-lost-city-cahokia https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2004/septemberoctober/feature...

sutterbomb 9y ago

I just read the book “1491” which covers a lot on this theme. Recommended. Short answer: it was always politicized, in various ways, for various ends. Most of those ways downplayed the size, scope and sophistication of native cultures.

CureLiberalism 9y ago
You seem to have totally missed the core point as it relates to this matter in that book 1491. IF one is to believe (which is by no means a given considering no clear evidence is provided and incentives existed to falsify accounts in order to either justify or gain support for extremely expensive expeditions) the earliest accounts that, e.g., claim the south south east of the USA had human habitation as far as the eye could see based on smoke plumes rising all throughout the countryside, and you compare that to the later accounts (~100 years later) of "Conquistadors" (let's all remember that the real "perpetrators" of the American "genocide" are actually hispanics) who report basically desolate and empty wild nature in the very same regions that were claimed to have been chocked full of people, then you have to invariably conclude that it is simply not know what cause the supposed depopulation, but that it could be ANY number of factors that are possibly not related to hispanics committing genocide on all of the Americas. Reality simply is that WE DO NOT KNOW WHAT HAPPENED, but we do know that if it was humans' fault, it was overwhelmingly the hispanics that did it. And that's an irrefutable and objective FACT that even the mentally ill liberals advance on a day to day basis when they claim that there was a genocide in the Americas at all. It was always the hispanics that committed any genocide that was committed and they perpetrated the overwhelming amount of slavery that muslims started in Africa and Africans supplied. It's funny how people like you seem to not be able to see through the abusive relationship you are in any more than some other person that is in an abusive relationship with a liar, cheater, manipulator. It's quite sad to watch you not only destroy yourselves, but also destroy the very source of basically all human advancement. But I'm sure you noble savage racist types will be happy when the genocide against your own kind commences and you can be beaten and killed like you have become mentally ill in believing you deserve.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
52-6F-62 9y ago
This was also dramatized in the film The Lost City of Z to some extent. It's worth a watch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(film)
- aqme28 9y ago
  Or a read. The book is fantastic.
noefingway 9y ago
I read "1491" and "1493" recently. The big take away for me was how the pre-European population successfully managed their environments in both North and South America. The environments that Europeans encountered were not so much wild and as they were managed. In North America fire was an important tool in managing forests. Something that BLM and the forest services have only recently come to understand, after hundreds of years.

badosu 9y ago

Up to the end of sec. XVIII most Brazilians spoke a creole of portuguese and indian languages (mostly tupi-guarani) tipped more to the indian side. Since most of written history is based on what the educated colonizers could write, and I would imagine they would not notice entire civilizations crumbling due to socioeconomical changes (due to urban living as a member of the elite, only really caring for the results of the extractivism), a lot of really important changes went by and we'll probably not ever know what happened. Remember that most interaction between natives and colonizers would be solely for the purpose of extraction of resources (chronologically: slaves for sugar and pau-brasil, gold, rubber and up to this day, farming/cattle) and catholic conversion (with one interesting exception for the spanish missions in the south, which even sided with the natives in wars [0]). I would not imagine these interactions to be performed with any considerations to understanding these people, and those who did would probably not even be able to read [1]. If you search the ancient history of Brazil (with luck you can span at most 3 centuries) you'll find plenty of foreign adventurers and not many brazilians. Most colonization of Brazil happened cronologically in the northeast, southwest, south and gradually expanding to the center into Minas Gerais [2]. Expansion to the north only happened massively at the end of the XIX century for rubber extraction. So I would imagine 4 centuries would be enough time for whole indigenous civilizations to disappear without anyone noticing. My non-educated guess would be that the first serious brazillian researchers would just appear in the mid sec. XX [3], and this just on the center-west area bordering the north. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Miguel_das_Miss%C3%B5es https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Miguel_das_Miss%C3%B5... 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandeirantes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandeirantes 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minas_Gerais#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minas_Gerais#History 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villas-B%C3%B4as_brothers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villas-B%C3%B4as_brothers

freehunter 9y ago
>sec. XVIII For anyone who doesn't speak Portuguese (myself included), this means "18th century".

spanxx 9y ago

Amazon was mainly conquered by Portuguese, so no, Spaniards are not to blame.

mbroncano 9y ago
To be completely precise, Portugal was under Spanish control for a sizeable part of the XVI and XVII century.
- benbreen 9y ago
  If we're going to get pedantic, it's more accurate to say that both the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal were dynastic possessions of the House of Hapsburg from 1580 to 1640. Hence why it's called a "joint monarchy" or "personal union" in English - Portugal was never folded into Spanish state control, it was just another hereditary claim of the Kings of Spain, like the Low Countries or Naples. In terms of real-world impact in South America, based on the sources I've looked at, the joint monarchy was pretty negligible. Brazil was in many ways an independent state long before it actually split off from the Portuguese empire, anyway.
  - dmckeon 9y ago
    One of the triggering events for the independence of Brazil was a 13 year period during the Napoleonic wars when the Portuguese Crown and their court of ~15k people moved to Brazil just before Lisbon was invaded. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_the_Portuguese_Court_to_Brazil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfer_of_the_Portuguese_C...

jcranmer 9y ago

The short answer is that many written accounts aren't necessarily reliable--and we've come to understand (more recently) that many historians made things up if reality didn't conform to their world view. Actually, the "make things up" still continues to this day; most popular history books fall prey to this. In the past 60ish years, we've started to make good strides in rebuilding our understanding of history based on firmer grounding of reliable facts and evidence, but where we lack reliable archaeological evidence to backstop our historical narratives, we still end up relying on plausible lies. South American archaeology is much less thoroughly explored than North American or European archaeology, so we've had less ability to revisit what we thought we knew. We are learning more, but this is very recent (21st century recent, far too new to really percolate into the popular history sphere).

benbreen 9y ago

I'm an historian of the colonial Americas. I agree with the comment below about 1491 being a great guide to this question. The very short answer is that there was an active effort throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to establish a myth of an untouched wilderness that settlers "expanded into" rather than confronting the reality of conquest. The longer answer involves the above, plus a lot of population demography and source analysis regarding the effects of "virgin soil" epidemics. Crosby's Ecological Imperialism is an excellent guide to that stuff. Even the very earliest European accounts of populations in the interior, like the expedition of de Soto, [1] are describing the aftermath of massive depopulation, since many diseases were spread by an advance guard of European domesticated animals before any Europeans actually showed up on the scene (or at least, any literate ones did). [1] https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2004/septemberoctober/feature/the-lost-city-cahokia https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2004/septemberoctober/feature...