p>Bush himself calls the paper, co-authored with Claudia Listopad, William D. Gosling, and Christopher Williams of Florida Tech, Paulo E. de Oliveira of Universidade do Guarulhos in Brazil, Miles R. Silman and Carolyn Krisel of Wake Forest and Mauro B. de Toledo of Florida Tech and Universidade Federal Fluminense in Brazil, an important first step in making the case, through core sampling and pollen and charcoal analysis of sediment from seven lake bottoms, three in one district, four in the other, that much of Amazonia has not been transformed by human actions, and ideally should be kept that way, to preserve species biodiversity.
"The way to see this is as a sneak peak," he says. "It's a new way to look at landscapes and it's a new tool. The study needs to be replicated in more places before people will be persuaded, but it's certainly a warning shot across the bow."
"While the majority of archaeologists argue the rivers were the major conduit for populations," he adds, "there is an increasing vocalization that there was much more widespread habitat transformation; that you still had a bulk of people along the river but their influence extended deep into the forest. It's still nebulous, and difficult to get people to map stuff, or put hard numbers on it, but there is a sentiment that the Amazonia has been disturbed and that the view of the Amazonian rainforest as a built landscape is gaining momentum. There are extremes at either ends, and the majority of people are in middle but there's a tendency of drifting toward the high end."
For example, he says 1950s population estimates were 1 million, in the 70s that estimate drifted up to 4 million; and in the 1990s drifted up to 10 million.
"We've now got a polarized community," he says.
At one end, he says, is Anna Roosevelt of the Field Museum in Chicago (she argues for large populations dispersed throughout Amazonia); at the other is Betty Meggers at Smithsonian (sh
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Source:Florida Institute of Technology
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