"On the eastern slopes of the Andes Mountains, in the remote San Martin Province of Peru, lie the abandoned ruins of a mysterious civilization. Modern Peruvians tell us that a people whom they call the Chachapoya, 'the cloud people,' built these structures. The most notable of these is the massive Kuelap Fortress [see videos below], which contains more stone than even the pyramid of Cheops [the Great Pyramid] in Egypt. The Chachapoyan civilization, which according to the carbon-14 dating method dates at least as far back as 400 AD, existed until around 1500 AD. At that time, it succumbed to two external forces that arose in short succession. First, the expanding Incan Empire, which conquered the Chachapoyan civilization around 1490 after 20 years of fierce resistance, and next, diseases that the Europeans introduced after 1492 and which started showing up among the Chachapoya around 1535, diseases to which the Chachapoya had no immunity." Source: Lew Rockwell (2016).
Note: This article is based on the speculative theory that Carthaginians and some of their Celtic allies from northern Italy settled in South America following the Roman destruction of Carthage in 146 BC. The article and others I've seen describe the Chachapoyans as "European," but the citizens of Carthage were a Semitic people descended from the Phoenicians who originally founded the city. The Chachapoyans are described in the sources as being lighter than the other people living around them, but that doesn't mean that they were white Europeans.
"Ancient sources described the Chachapoya, the famous Cloud Warriors of Peru, as individuals with lighter skin than that of other peoples from the region, such as the Incas," according to Ancient Origins. "Also, they stood apart not only by their physical characteristics, but by the unique culture which they left behind." Among other things, they were apparently headhunters and shape-shifting sorcerers who mummified their dead. "The Incas feared the mummies of the Chachapoya, viewing them as the living dead who could rise and inflict death upon all those arrogant or ignorant enough to disturb them." (Ibid) The Incas eventually overcame their fear and conquered the Chachapoyas shortly before they themselves were conquered by the Spanish.
The theory that the Carthaginians or Phoenicians may have reached South America is an interesting one and at least theoretically possible since the Phoenicians were renowned for their seamanship, but the lack of archaeological evidence probably constitutes evidence in itself that they never made the voyage. Most of the mainstream sources I've found describe the Chachapoya as a tribe of South American indians.
"The Chachapoya Indians, often described in popular media as Peru's ancient 'Cloud People,' inhabited the Andean tropical cloud forests between the Maranon and Huallaga River valleys prior to their rapid cultural disintegration after the Spanish conquest in AD 1532. In anthropology and in the popular imagination, the Chachapoya represent the quintessential 'lost tribe,' founders of a 'lost civilization,' and builders of 'lost cities' now abandoned and concealed by cold and rainy tropical cloud forests." -- Encyclopedia of Anthropology (PDF). Note: Some of the opening text appears to be missing from this paper.
Deforestation & The Loss Of Terra Incognita
"A new study counters the view that tropical forests were pristine natural environments prior to modern agriculture and industrialization. Moreover, humans have in fact been having a dramatic impact on such forest ecologies for tens of thousands of years, through techniques ranging from controlled burning of sections of forest to plant and animal management to clear-cutting." Source: Science Daily (2017).
Comment: Humans have lived in the rainforests for thousands of years, but there's a big difference between the controlled burns and clear-cutting practiced by aboriginal tribes and the massive destruction which started during the last century.
For example, the 2012 NASA time-lapse video below shows the scale of the deforestation taking place in one section of the Amazon rainforest between around 1975 and 2010. The changes are pretty dramatic and this kind of destruction is happening all over the world.
According to Wikipedia, deforestation "accelerated significantly between 1991 and 2004, reaching an annual forest loss rate of 27,423 km² in 2004. Though the rate of deforestation has been slowing since 2004 (with re-accelerations in 2008 and 2013), the remaining forest cover continues to dwindle."
Deforestation is an inevitable result of industrialization, economic growth and overpopulation, and the loss of wilderness, even if it hasn't been pristine for millennia, doesn't just have ecological effects. For instance, I've always thought that one of the most appealing things about the ancient world is that it was still an unexplored wilderness to a large extent.
When Julius Caesar wrote his history of the wars in Gaul, he mentioned at one point that no one knew what lay on the other side of the Black Forest. Technically that wasn't true, of course -- the Germanic tribes had been living in the forest for a long time and there was a whole continent full of people to the east -- but the point is that it was still possible at the time for large sections of the planet to be terra incognita, even to a culture as large and sophisticated as the Roman republic.
The loss of this terra incognita has a mass psychological impact. It's the closing of the mental frontier. Like air travel, the disappearance of the wilderness makes the world a smaller place where most people end up concentrated in urban centers, an army of disposable proles who can be found by the millions in shanty slums and megacities surrounded by hundreds of miles of countryside which have been turned into agricultural factory floors.
Deforestation, industrialization and population growth are all connected. There's a feedback loop involved here. Clearing the forest makes it possible to grow more crops which leads to population growth which creates a demand for more crops which leads to more deforestation, and industrialization just makes the whole process faster and more efficient. Villages turn into towns which grow into cities and spread across the land like outbreaks of tobacco mosaic virus while the map changes color from green to brown and concrete gray.
In the near term, the situation looks grim. In the long term, it doesn't matter because it's not possible to eradicate wilderness. The current deforestation is only temporary. Wilderness always returns when civilization collapses and it can happen very quickly. Most people would say that this is no excuse for complacency, but what exactly can be done to stop the loss of wilderness on any meaningful scale? Doing that would require deindustrialization, depopulation and deliberate attempts to stop development in societies which are still struggling to pull themselves out of extreme poverty.
There are still sparsely populated and little explored places on Earth, but the real terra incognita now is outer space.
Posted at 07:01 AM in Archeology News, Climate, Commentary, Current Affairs, South America, Videos | Permalink