He is actually an anthropologist, but as native peoples have vanished, the distinction between anthropologists and archaeologists has blurred. Balée is at Tulane University, in New Orleans. Erickson is based at the University of Pennsylvania he works in concert with a Bolivian archaeologist, whose seat in the plane I usurped that day. The Amazon Rainforest Was Profoundly Changed by Ancient Humans Robinson MeyerĬlark Erickson and William Balée, the archaeologists, sat up front. This peculiar, remote, watery plain was what had drawn the researchers' attention, and not just because it was one of the few places on earth inhabited by people who might never have seen Westerners with cameras.

The rest of the year the water dries up and the bright-green vastness turns into something that resembles a desert. For almost half the year rain and snowmelt from the mountains to the south and west cover the land with an irregular, slowly moving skin of water that eventually ends up in the province's northern rivers, which are sub-subtributaries of the Amazon. By that time the archaeologists had their cameras out and were clicking away in delight.īelow us was the Beni, a Bolivian province about the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, and nearly as flat. In a few minutes the roads and houses disappeared, and the only evidence of human settlement was the cattle scattered over the savannah like jimmies on ice cream. The plane took off in weather that was surprisingly cool for north-central Bolivia and flew east, toward the Brazilian border.

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