America Before

by Graham Hancock

  24. The fertility of terra preta is discussed at length in Scheub et al., Terra Preta, 6.

  25. WinklerPrins, “Terra Preta: The Mysterious Soils of the Amazon,” 236. The quoted passage continues: “In the generally high humidity and high rainfall environments such as found in the Amazon basin, most nutrients in the soil mineralize and are leached out of the system quickly, and because of this, the vegetation of the region typically absorbs nutrients quickly from the soil once these have been released in the soil through decomposition or other processes.”

  26. Ibid.

  27. Ibid. “The carbon found in ADE’s is aromatic carbon (also known as black or pyrogenic carbon) that is likely a consequence of the incorporation of charcoal into the soil. … Soils with this type of carbon are able to retain, even attract nutrients, resulting in more plant-available phosphorus, calcium, and nitrogen, as the aromatic carbon acts as a carrying agent for nutrients. Aromatic carbon is also known to be highly resistant to degradation.”

  28. Morris, “Putting the Carbon Back,” 625. The cited passage continues: “They become homes for populations of microorganisms that turn the soil into that spongy, fragrant, dark material that gardeners everywhere love to plunge their hands into. The char is not the only good stuff in terra preta—additions such as excrement and bone probably play a role too—but it is the most important factor. Leaving aside the subtleties of how char particles improve fertility, the sheer amount of carbon they can stash away is phenomenal.”

  29. William Balée, “Amazonian Dark Earths,” Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 8, no. 1 (2010), 5. Emphasis in the original. The cited passage goes on to state: “Biochar is believed to be the principal source of the color of the Amazon Dark Earths as well as the reason for retention of nutrients. Microbial activity leads to increased carbon sequestration. That is what makes ADEs of interest in research on climate change. The higher and more diverse the microbial activity, the better the soil, and ADE is richer and more diverse in microbes than surrounding soils, even though millions of these species remain to be identified precisely and literally a million separate taxa can be contained in only 10 grams of soil. A significant proportion of the microbes in ADE are different from the microbes in the surrounding primeval soils.”

  30. Glaser and Woods, Amazonian Dark Earths, 4. The cited passage continues: “The consequent increase in microbiological activity adds colloidally sized organic decomposition products to the soil matrix.”

  31. Ibid., 4.

  32. WinklerPrins, “Terra Preta: The Mysterious Soils of the Amazon,” 236.

  33. Neves et al., “Dark Earths and the Human Built Landscape in Amazonia,” 153.

  34. Balée, “Amazonian Dark Earths,” 5.

  35. See, for example, A. C. Roosevelt, “The Amazon and the Anthropocene: 13,000 Years of Human Influence in a Tropical Rainforest,” Anthropocene 4 (December 2013), 79, 80; Clement et al., “The Domestication of Amazonia Before European Conquest,” 3; Lizzie Wade, “Searching for the Amazon’s Hidden Civilizations,” Science (January 7, 2014), http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/01/searching-amazons-hidden-civilizations.

  36. Neves et al., “Historical and Socio-Cultural Origins of Amazonian Dark Earths,” 38.

  37. Ibid.

  38. Ibid.

  39. Ibid.

  40. Ibid., 37–38.

  41. Clement et al., “The Domestication of Amazonia Before European Conquest,” 3.

  42. Morris, “Putting the Carbon Back,” 624.

  43. B. Liang et al., “Black Carbon Increases Cation Exchange Capacity in Soils,” Soil Science Society of America Journal (September 1, 2006), 1719 and 1720. See also Jennifer Watling et al., “Direct Archaeological Evidence for Southwestern Amazonia as an Early Plant Domestication and Food Production Centre,” PLoS One (July 25, 2018), 2: “New radiocarbon dates associated with Massangana phase deposits of lithic artefacts in what appear to be Anthropogenic Dark Earths, or terra preta, matrices at Garbin and Teotonio sites have also pushed regional ADE formation as far back as ca 7,000–6,790 to 8,600–8,420 cal BP … which makes the dark earths of the Upper Madeira some 3,500 years older than the rest of Amazonia.”

  44. See, for example, Palace et al., “Ancient Amazonian Populations Left Lasting Impacts on Forest Structure,” 3: “The quest to map ADE locations has been stymied by the immense size of Amazonia, remoteness in many areas, dense forest, and lack of archaeological field surveys.”

  14: GARDENING EDEN

  1. A. C. Roosevelt, “The Amazon and the Anthropocene: 13,000 Years of Human Influence in a Tropical Rainforest,” Anthropocene (May 27, 2014), 82.

  2. Ibid.

  3. C. Levis et al., “Persistent Effects of Pre-Columbian Plant Domestication on Amazonian Forest Composition,” Science 355 (March 3, 2017), 926.

  4. Roosevelt, “The Amazon and the Anthropocene,” 82.

  5. Levis et al., “Persistent Effects of Pre-Columbian Plant Domestication on Amazonian Forest Composition,” 925.

  6. Ibid., 927.

  7. Ibid., 927–928.

  8. Ibid., 925, 931.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Carolina Levis interviewed in The Atlantic, March 2, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/03/its-now-clear-that-ancient-humans-helped-enrich-the-amazon/518439/. See also Levis et al., “Persistent Effects of Pre-Columbian Plant Domestication on Amazonian Forest Composition,” 925: “In Amazonia, plant domestication started earlier than 8000 BP.”

  11. See also Levis et al., “Persistent Effects of Pre-Columbian Plant Domestication on Amazonian Forest Composition,” 926.

  12. See, for example, Clement et al., “The Domestication of Amazonia Before European Conquest,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B (July 22, 2015), 2, and Annalee Newitz, “The Amazon Rainforest Is the Result of an 8,000-Year Experiment,” ArsTechnica (March 6, 2017), https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/03/the-amazon-forest-is-the-result-of-a-8000-year-experiment/. See also Charles R. Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” Diversity (March 2010), 72–186.

  13. Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” 84–85 and 92, and Barbara Pickersgill, “Domestication of Plants in the Americas: Insights from Mendelian and Molecular Genetics,” Annals of Botany 100, no. 5 (October 2007), 929.

  14. Clement et al., “The Domestication of Amazonia Before European Conquest,” 1. See also Jennifer Watling et al., “Direct Archaeological Evidence for Southwestern Amazonia as an Early Plant Domestication and Food Production Centre,” PLoS One 13, no. 7 (2018), e0199868.

  15. Clement et al., “The Domestication of Amazonia Before European Conquest,” 2.

  16. Pickersgill, “Domestication of Plants in the Americas,” 930, and Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” 72–73, 85–87. See also Chanie Kirschner, “Do Pineapples Grow on Trees?” April 8, 2012, https://www.mnn.com/your-home/organic-farming-gardening/questions/do-pineapples-grow-on-trees. Potted pineapple plants are now sold in supermarkets as houseplants: https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/shopping/news/a2807/asda-selling-pineapple-plants.

  17. Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” 86.

  18. Ibid., 73.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Ibid., 76.

  21. Ibid., 73 and 75.

  22. Christian Isendahl, “The Domestication and Early Spread of Manioc: A Brief Synthesis,” Latin American Antiquity 22, no. 4 (December 2011), 452.

  23. Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” 77.

  24. Tom D. Dillehay et al., “Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru,” Science 316, no. 5833 (June 29, 2007), 1890.

  25. Ibid., 1891.

  26. Spencer P. M. Harrington, “Earliest Agriculture in the New World,” Archaeology 50, no. 4 (July/August 1997), https://archive.archaeology.org/9707/newsbriefs/squash.html.

  27. Dillehay et al.
, “Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru,” 1890–1891.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Ibid.; see also Pickersgill, “Domestication of Plants in the Americas,” 930.

  30. Pickersgill, “Domestication of Plants in the Americas,” 930: “One important legume, the peanut or groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), a tetraploid annual, was domesticated east of the Andes, probably close to the area in which cassava was domesticated. It became widespread prehistorically, possibly spreading in association with cassava.” See also Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” 93, Figure 3, which includes peanuts among “native Amazonian crops.”

  31. For manioc, see Clement et al., “Origin and Domestication of Native Amazonian Crops,” 77 and 92. For peanuts, see Dillehay et al., “Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru,” 1891.

  32. Isendahl, “The Domestication and Early Spread of Manioc,” 452. See also Watling et al., “Direct Archaeological Evidence for Southwestern Amazonia as an Early Plant Domestication and Food Production Centre,” 19: For manioc, “genetic evidence points to a domestication event sometime between 8,000 and 10,000 BP.”

  33. Isendahl, “The Domestication and Early Spread of Manioc,” 454.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Dillehay et al., “Preceramic Adoption of Peanut, Squash, and Cotton in Northern Peru,” 1890.

  36. Pickersgill, “Domestication of Plants in the Americas,” 930.

  37. Isendahl, “The Domestication and Early Spread of Manioc,” 455.

  38. Ibid.

  39. See, for example, H. C. Heaton (ed.), The Discovery of the Amazon According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents (American Geographical Society, 1934), 172.

  40. “Manioc Processing Amongst Brazil’s Canela Indians,” https://anthropology.si.edu/canela/manioc.htm.

  41. And see Watling et al., “Direct Archaeological Evidence for Southwestern Amazonia as an Early Plant Domestication and Food Production Centre,” 21–22: “The pervading view is that the early Holocene inhabitants of the upper Madeira were simple hunter-gatherers from a ‘pre’-landscape domestication age. However, this scenario seems unlikely if we think about the following: we know manioc was domesticated—and therefore cultivated—by societies in the same region during the Girau phase, and probably, we have argued, by the Girau-period inhabitants themselves. In domesticating manioc, people not only improved various aspects such as the size and production of its tubers, photosynthetic rates and seed functionality, but they did this by repeated cycles of recombination and selection which involved clonal propagation as a viable reproductive mechanism (wild manioc cannot reproduce from stem cuttings). This process, which was completed by 8,000 years ago, required highly sophisticated knowledge of the natural world.”

  42. F. F. F. Teles, “Chronic Poisoning by Hydrogen Cyanide in Cassava and Its Prevention in Africa and Latin America,” Food and Nutrition Bulletin 23, no. 4 (2002), 407–412, esp. p. 410.

  43. Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (Victor Gollancz, 1995), 39.

  44. Ibid., 40.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Examples of studies revealing the transformative power of ayahuasca and its contribution to the Western Consciousness Revolution are psychologist Rachel Harris’s Listening to Ayahuasca (New World Library, 2017); medical doctor Joe Tafur’s The Fellowship of the River: A Medical Doctor’s Exploration into Traditional Plant Medicine (Joseph Tafur, 2017); and ex-veteran Alex Seymour’s Psychedelic Marine: A Transformational Journey from Afghanistan to the Amazon (Park Street Press, 2016), among very many more.

  15: SACRED GEOMETRY

  1. Stanislas Dehaene et al., “Core Knowledge of Geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group,” Science 311 (January 20, 2006), 381.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ibid., 381, 384.

  4. Ibid., 381.

  5. Ibid.

  6. Charles Mann, “Ancient Earthmovers of the Amazon,” Science 321 (August 29, 2008), 148.

  7. Martti Pärssinen, Denise Schaan, and Alceu Ranzi, “Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purús,” Antiquity 83, no. 322 (December 1, 2009), 1087.

  8. Ibid., 1084–1095.

  9. Ibid., 1084.

  10. Ibid., 1085.

  11. Ibid., 1087.

  12. See discussion and photographs in Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, Heaven’s Mirror: Quest for the Lost Civilization (Penguin, 1998), 257–269.

  13. Cited in Mann, “Ancient Earthmovers of the Amazon,” 1148.

  14. Denise P. Schaan, Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia (Routledge, 2012), 142–143.

  15. Maria Reiche interviewed by Graham Hancock and Santha Faiia, June 12, 1993, reported in Heaven’s Mirror, 261.

  16. Anthony F. Aveni, Between the Lines: The Mystery of the Giant Ground Drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru (University of Texas Press, 2000), 34.

  17. New World Encyclopedia, “Nazca Lines” (accessed July 23, 2018), http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Nazca_Lines.

  18. J. G. Fleagle, Primate Adaptation and Evolution, 2nd ed. (Academic Press, 1998), 172.

  19. Aveni, Between the Lines, 34.

  20. Dimensions from Maria Reiche, Mystery on the Desert (Editorial E Emprenta Entoria, 1949, reprinted 1996), 24.

  21. Firm identification of the Nazca spider with Ricinulei was first made by Professor Gerald S. Hawkins. See Gerald S. Hawkins, Beyond Stonehenge (Arrow Books, 1977), 143–144. For their categorization as “tickspiders,” see British Arachnological Society, “Hooded Tickspiders (Ricinulei),” http://britishspiders.org.uk/wiki2015/index.php?title=Category:Ricinulei.

  22. Ricardo Pinto-da Rocha and Renata Andrade, “A New Species of Cryptocellus (Arachnida: Ricinulei) from Eastern Amazonia,” Zoologica 29, no. 5 (October 2012), 474–478. See also Joachim U. Adis et al., “On the Abundance and Ecology of Ricinulei (Arachnida) from Central Amazonia, Brazil,” Journal of the New York Entomological Society 97, no. 2 (1989), 133–140.

  23. See, for example, Alexandre B. Ronaldo and Ricardo Pinto-da Rocha, “On a New Species of Cryptocellus from the Brazilian Amazon (Arachnida, Ricinulei),” Revista Ibérica de Aracnología 7 (June 30, 2003), 103–108; and Pinto-da Rocha and Andrade, “A New Species of Cryptocellus (Arachnida: Ricinulei) from Eastern Amazonia,” 474–478.

  24. Ronaldo and Pinto-da Rocha, “On a New Species of Cryptocellus from the Brazilian Amazon (Arachnida, Ricinulei),” 103: “Like the spider pedipalp, the ricinuleid third leg offers numerous species-specific features that are very important in the recognition of individual species.”

  25. Ibid.

  26. Hawkins, Beyond Stonehenge, 144.

  27. Pärssinen, Schaan, and Ranzi, “Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purús,” 1087. See pp. 1090–1091 for some specific examples cited in the paper, for example, “a 250m wide quadrangular structure, crossed by a 12m wide NE-SW oriented road, leading after 1300m to [a] geoglyph site … which is comprised of a rectangular structure with rounded corners, measuring 200 × 260m. … Another rectangular structure … is a 100m wide square, with a road leaving it in the south direction, vanishing after 120m. The fourth example … is a double ditched square, with roads leaving from the centre of its north, east and south sides.”

  28. Ibid., 1091.

  29. Ibid., 1087–1088.

  30. Sanna Saunaluoma, Martti Pärssinen, and Denise Schaan, “Diversity of Pre-colonial Earthworks in the Brazilian State of Acre, Southwestern Amazonia,” Journal of Field Archaeology (July 9, 2018), 5–6.

  31. Ibid., 5.

  32. Ibid., 7–8.

  33. Ibid., 10–11.

  34. Pärssinen, Schaan, and Ranzi, “Pre-Columbian Geometric Earthworks in the Upper Purús,” 1094.

  35. Ibid., 1089.

  36. Ibid., 1090.

  37. Ibid., 1089.

  38. Denise Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Pre-Columbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” Journal o
f Field Archaeology 37 (2012), 132–142.

  39. Ibid., 133.

  40. Ibid., 137–138.

  41. Ibid., 132.

  42. E. W. Herrmann et al., “A New Multistage Construction Chronology for the Great Serpent Mound, USA,” Journal of Archaeological Science 50 (2014), 117–125.

  43. Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” 135.

  44. J. H. Cole, Survey of Egypt Paper No. 39, Determination of the Exact Size and Orientation of the Great Pyramid of Giza (Government Press, Cairo, 1925), 6.

  45. For the accuracy of the Great Pyramid’s cardinal alignments, see I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt (Penguin Books, 1993), 99–100. For the cardinal orientation of the Severino Calazans geoglyph, see Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” 135, Figure 3. These authors do not provide precise survey details and note (on p. 136) that the site has been damaged by modern intrusions. Nonetheless, from the information they do provide, its general cardinal orientation is not in doubt.

  46. Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil,” 136.

  47. Ibid., 136, Table I.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid., 135.

  50. Ibid., 136.

  51. Ibid.

  52. Ibid.

  53. According to Mann, “Ancient Earthmovers of the Amazon,” p. 1148, at a time when more than 150 geoglyphs had been found Pärssinen estimated this number to represent “less than 10%” of the total.

  54. John Francis Carson et al., “Environmental Impact of Geometric Earthwork Construction in the Pre-Columbian Amazon,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 29 (July 22, 2014), 10497.

  55. Schaan et al., “New Radiometric Dates for Precolumbian (2000–700 BP) Earthworks in Western Amazonia, Brazil”: A date of 2577 BC was retrieved from excavation unit 3 (p. 136, Table I); it measures 230 meters along each side; and its full perimeter, defined by an enclosure ditch 12 meters wide, measures 920 meters—more than 3,000 feet (p. 135). The Great Pyramid has almost the same footprint; see Cole, Determination of the Exact Size and Orientation of the Great Pyramid of Giza, 6. For the accuracy of the Great Pyramid’s cardinal alignments, which are the same as those given by Severino Calazans, see Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, 99–100.