The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine Read Free Book Online

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    The coastal polities declined at the start of the first millennium BCE . The reasons are obscure, but one suggestion is that the region was devastated by a severeEl Niño event in which warm surface waters prevented the normal upwelling of cold waters on the coast. This would have resulted in a depletion of fish stocks and caused torrential rains and flooding that drove people inland. Whatever the explanation, between 900 and 200 BCE the highlands prospered, especially at the site in west-central Peru known asChavín de Huantar, which gives its name to a pan-Andean culture that was a forerunner of theIncas. Chavín culture had little immediate connection with the ocean or inlandwaters per se, but it is of interest to maritime historians. Not only does it seem to have evolved from or been significantly influenced by the marine-oriented society of the Peruvian coast, but Chavín also linked disparate regions that relied to a considerable degree on water transport and associated technologies fromEcuador toAmazonia, a massive region of rain forest and savanna bounded by the Andes, the Guiana Highlands, and theBrazilian Highlands. One ofChavín’s earliest long-distance trades was with the southern coast of Ecuador, a source of shells from thethorny oyster, a major prestige gift of the time, and conch. These were being traded south by sea perhaps as early as the third millennium BCE . At their source, oyster and conch shells were used for tools and ornaments, but in Andean and coastal Peru they had a symbolic importance in rituals and were fashioned into beads, pendants, and figurines. Initially they may have been traded for perishable goods that have not survived in the archaeological record, but by the first millennium CE they were probably being exchanged for copper and obsidian.
    Research over the past few decades has overturned long-heldviews that Amazonia was inhabited by primitive forest tribes content to subsist on the jungle’s low-lying fruit. The people who lived along the major river systems of tropical South America, notably the Amazon, Orinoco, and their tributaries, are now seen as masters of their environment who planted tropical orchards, built curbed roads up to fifty meters wide as well as causeways, bridges, dikes, reservoirs, and raised agricultural fields. These structures have been found across a vast swath of the continent from easternBolivia to Manaus, where the Río Negro meets the Amazon, along the upper Xingu River in Mato Grosso state, and the huge equatorial island of Marajó at the mouth of the Amazon near Belém. While many of these finds date from the first millennium ce, Marajó is home to the oldest known pottery in the Americas, dating from 6000 BCE .
    The earliest written account of a journey down the Amazon, byGaspar de Carvajal, offers vivid descriptions of a number of extensive and highly developed riverside societies. Carvajal was one of fifty-seven men underFrancisco de Orellana who in 1542 spent eight months on the Napo, Maraño, andAmazon Rivers. According to Carvajal, the people of “the great dominion of Machiparo” above Manaus had fifty thousand men at arms and occupied territories that “extended for more than eighty leagues” (about 470 kilometers). The Spaniard marveled at the size and quality of the pottery, including jars with a capacity of nearlyfour hundred liters and smaller pieces the equal of any he had seen in Spain. He wrote of running battles with tribes led by women—the Amazons—while farther east the Spanish encountered “two hundred pirogues, [so large] that each one carries twenty or thirty Indians and someforty,” the warriors accompanied by musicians who “came on with so much noise and shouting and in such good order that we were astonished.” The people of the Amazon were obliterated by diseases introduced from Europe and Africa, and the survivors were so reduced in numbers that they could not maintain the quality of life of their forebears.