Sarisariñama looms above the rainforest, its presence all-consuming, domineering.
Spreading for thousands of miles from the base of the table mountain’s sheer cliffs lies one of the most inhospitable realms on the planet. A place teeming with life yet deadly to it, its lush façade harbouring terrors beyond imagination.
Many have tried to conquer it. All have failed.
To humans, the Amazon rainforest is not an emerald paradise.
It is hell.
A green hell.
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Rainforests cannot be ‘tamed’ by human societies. Not without the mass deforestation of large swathes of it by modern agricultural settlers and the use of sophisticated technology.
Or, at least, that is the view of conventional thinking.
Indeed, the Amazon Rainforest has extorted a horrendous toll on those who have explored it. Francisco de Orellana was supposedly the first European who set off in search of El Dorado in 1541. Over a month later, much of his group had succumbed to disease, snake bites, animal attacks or assaults by Indigenous tribe people. He never found El Dorado (or the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for that matter), but he made it out and regaled the courts in Spain with fanciful tales of his adventure. Colonel Percy Fawcett, however, searching for the equally mythical ‘Lost City of Z’ in 1925, was part of many expeditions that were not so lucky.
Indeed, before his disappearance, Fawcett described the rainforest as a ‘green hell.’ A place filled with nothing besides trees, plants, animals and savages, all wanting nothing more than to kill you. It cannot be tamed; it cannot be colonised. It cannot harbour sophisticated societies like the Inca in the Andes to the west or the Maya and the Aztec to the north.
The so-called primitive tribes that make the rainforest their home exist in a hunter-gatherer ecosystem. This is because the rainforest environment is too inhospitable – subjected to floods, mudslides and dangerous animals – to allow a culture the time and resources needed to ‘advance’ up the ladder to so-called civilisation.
On top of this, the soils are stripped of their nutrients by the thick vegetation, making it impossible to cultivate large-scale crops, a surplus of which is commonly believed to be a critical factor in the development of state-level societies.
Fawcett’s disappearance seemed only to drive home the formidable nature of the rainforest. ‘If we can’t do it, then the uncivilised savages certainly can’t,’ seems to have become the mantra of anyone tempted to suggest some form of civilisation within this green hell.
In these words, I hear echoed the so-called Hamitic Hypothesis that stalked my father and my research into our own ancient African culture. Succinctly, those of European ancestry are inherently more advanced and more sophisticated than any other ethnic group. If a white man cannot do a thing, then a black man (or an Indian, Aboriginal, or any other ‘lesser’ race certainly cannot).
Yet, far from savages struggling to survive, recent research has shown that the remarkable ancient inhabitants of the Amazon Rainforest thrived. Potentially thousands of people occupied vast cities interconnected by roads and canals; they even built megalithic ceremonial structures likened to Stonehenge.
In 2005, archaeologists excavated 127 bizarre standing stones at Rego Grande in Brazil, each around 3 meters high. They are between 500 and 2000 years old, and archaeo-astronomers recently concluded that they form a ‘solar observatory’.
Cremated human remains, urns, and animal and human-like figurines seem to support the claim that it was an important ceremonial centre. Numerous smaller megalithic sites are also found along the Rego Grande River.
At Kuhikugu, in Brazil’s Xingu National Park, archaeologist Michael Heckenberger has worked alongside the Kuikuro people. They’ve uncovered the remains of houses and defensive ditches, 3 meters deep and 10 meters wide and backed by wooden palisades.
Pulling satellite imagery to support on-the-ground excavation, he has highlighted 28 towns and villages. These are spread throughout a 20,000 square kilometre area, all linked by roads, bridges and canoe-traversable waterways.
Near the Brazilian / Peruvian border, at Acre, modern deforestation has revealed over 450 enormous geoglyphs dotted across 13,000 square kilometres. Unlikely to be towns or defences, they were probably ceremonial centres. Their existence again offers evidence to support a far more sophisticated Amazonian culture than previously entertained.
The evidence suggests that unlike the destructive and unsustainable land use practised today, these ‘Ancient Amazonians’ adopted an ingenious subsistence regime that did not lead to forest degradation and destruction but symbiosis and, dare I say, harmony.
The Amazon rainforest, therefore, is anything but a ‘green hell’. But, of all the remnants of Ancient Amazonians that the jungle is slowly revealing, Sarisariñama may be the greatest and the most enigmatic.