Jungle

by Jungle (retail) (epub)

  Chapter 9

  CITIES IN THE “JUNGLE”

  Visions of “lost cities” in the jungle have plagued Western imaginations since Europeans first visited the tropics of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. From the Lost City of Z to El Dorado, a thirst for finding ancient civilizations and their treasures in perilous tropical forest settings has driven innumerable ill-fated expeditions. This obsession has diffused into Western societies’ popular ideas of tropical forest cities, with overgrown ruins acting as the backdrop for fear, discovery, and life-threatening challenges across a number of popular video games (the Uncharted series), horror films (The Ruins), and novels (The Jungle Book). Throughout all of these depictions runs the pervasive idea that all ancient cities and states in tropical forests were doomed to fail, that the most resilient occupants of tropical forests are small villages of poison-dart-blowing hunter-gatherers, and that vicious vines and towering trees or, in the case of The Jungle Book, a boisterous army of monkeys will inevitably claw any significant form of monumental human achievement back into the suffocating green from whence it came. This idea has not been helped by best-selling books or apocalyptic films that focus on the blockbuster “collapse” of particularly enigmatic societies, such as the Classic Maya. Ultimately, the decaying stone walls, the empty grand structures, and the deserted streets of these tropical urban leftovers act as a tragic warning that our own way of life, communities, and economies are not as infinitely secure as we would often like to assume.1

  The situation has not been all that dissimilar in academic considerations of the potential of tropical forests to sustain ancient urbanism. On the one hand, intensive agriculture seen as necessary to fuel the growth of cities and powerful social elites has simply been considered impossible on the wet, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of tropical forests. On the other hand, where the obvious rubble of cities can simply not be denied, in the drier tropics of North and Central America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, catastrophic ecological insolvency has been thought to have been inevitable. Deforestation to build massive buildings and make way for growing populations, an expansion of agriculture across marginal soils, and natural disasters such as mudslides, flooding, and drought, like today, must have made experimentation with tropical cities a big challenge at best and a fool’s gambit at worst. Overhauling these stereotypes has been difficult as the large, multiyear field explorations usually undertaken on the sites of ancient cities—for example, in Mesopotamia or Egypt—face unique tropical trials. Dense vegetation, mosquito-borne disease, poisonous plants and animals, and torrential weather have made finding, reaching, and excavating past urban centers in tropical forests arduous. Where organic materials, instead of stone, might have served as a construction material, the task becomes even more taxing. As a result, research into past tropical urbanism, its forms, economies, and extents, has somewhat trudged along behind similar research in the semiarid and arid zones of Mesopotamia and Egypt and the sweeping river valleys of East Asia.2

  Yet, as we saw in Chapters 7 and 8, many tropical forest societies found immensely successful avenues to food production in even the most challenging of circumstances. While these might not look like the “agricultural” fields we think of as supporting cities and states today, they could sustain impressively large populations and social structures. We now turn to some of the most famous examples of supposed tropical disaster, the Classic and Postclassic Maya, the Khmer Empire of Cambodia, and the cities of northern Sri Lanka, to see how the last two decades of intrepid archeological exploration, applying the latest science from both the land and air, have stripped away canopies to provide new, more favorable assessments. We will find that not only did precolonial tropical cities flourish, but they were actually some of the most extensive urban landscapes anywhere in the preindustrial world—far outstripping ancient Rome, Constantinople/Istanbul, and the ancient cities of China. We will find that even the supposedly most “pristine” forest region, the Amazon Basin, was actually home to millions of people extended across urban-like settlement networks. Ancient tropical cities could be remarkably resilient, sometimes surviving many centuries longer than colonial and industrial period urban networks in similar environments. Although they could face immense obstacles and often had to overhaul their social structures and settlement locations to beat changing climates and their own eventual overuse of the surrounding landscape, they also developed completely new forms of what a city could, and perhaps should, be. Extensive, interspersed with nature, and combining food production with social and political function, these ancient layouts are now catching the eyes of twenty-first-century urban planners trying to come to grips with tropical forests as sites of some of the fastest-growing human populations around the world today.

  AS WITH “AGRICULTURE,” we tend to view the concept of a “city” through a blinkered Western lens. Based on our own experiences, we think of cities as compact, densely populated areas, home to administrative and political elites, full of bustling trade and manufacturing, and fed by vast agricultural fields and animal herds often located at some distance from the city boundaries. For over fifty years, since the archeologist Gordon Childe coined the “agricultural” and “urban” revolutions as two major stepping-stones in human history, the same has been broadly true of archeology. Vast Near Eastern “tell” mound sites, formed from humongous accumulations of mudbricks and refuse and representing the earliest cities dating to around 6,000 years ago, as well as the cities of the classical world and ancient China, have acted as the standard for tracking the origins and expansion of a settlement pattern that, to a large extent, still shapes many of our lives today. This “model” of social complexity unsurprisingly seems somewhat out of place in tropical forests, where sweeping fields of uniform crops, grazing animals, and dense, built-up settlements can lead to drastic deforestation, subsequent soil erosion, and eventually starvation and social disintegration. As a result, where such seemingly “compact” cities have been identified in the tropics—for example, in the case of the Classic Maya of southeastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western Honduras and El Salvador—scientists have tended to assume the worst: that these cities and their farming focus on certain key crops were too much for their tropical forest landscapes, leading to degradation, an overthrow of rulers, and ultimate abandonment.3

  Figure 9.1. The ancient Classic Maya ceremonial center of Tikal, Guatemala. Michael Godek / Getty Images

  Maya urban forms began to appear around 800 BC in the so-called Preclassic period. Cities, monumental stone architecture, and writing all gradually emerged at certain key political centers led by kings and fed by the North and Central American staple crops of maize, beans, and squash. Things truly took off during the Classic period, especially in a region known as the southern lowlands (including northern Guatemala, Belize, and southeastern Mexico). Between AD 250 and 900, growing populations, more cities, more monuments, and more inscriptions appeared. The leaders of the famous cities of Tikal and Calakmul, populated by as many as 120,000 people, engaged in warfare, extended political influence, and harnessed long-distance, high-value prestige resources in ways that would make many of our more devious administrations proud today. Although many of these urban nodes were located on soils particularly suited to productive maize agriculture, there was one problem. Annual rainfall variation in the region could be as high as 2,000 millimeters (for comparison, the average annual rainfall recorded at Greenwich Observatory London between 1981 and 2010 was 621 mm), and the geology often made the capture and storage of precious water through the dry months challenging. As a consequence, major droughts witnessed in lake records from the region have been argued to have brought the system to its knees in the Terminal Classic period, between AD 800 and 900, in the southern lowlands. No response was possible given that the large centers and their political classes had already overreached, cutting down trees to fuel their monuments and planting their corn on poor soils as the more fertile regions “filled up.” Precariously sustaining th
eir populations across the heavily altered landscape, they could do nothing. People lost faith in elites, construction stopped, famine ensued, and the Classic population dispersed itself across the landscape to eke out a living in a drier world. Passing by these former centers a few hundred years later, Spanish explorers such as the infamous Hernán Cortés did not even deem what was left significant enough for comment, and the ruined cities awaited eventual “rediscovery” by intrepid American archeologists of the nineteenth century.4

  So often goes the classic story of the Classic Maya. Amazingly, however, as early as seventy years ago, surveys of Classic Maya cities by the archeologists William Coe and Gordon Wiley had already questioned such an interpretation of their urban organization and landscape placement. Far from being compact, we now know, even the best-known of Maya centers, like Copán and Tikal, practiced what has elsewhere been called “agrarian-based, low-density urbanism.”5 This effectively means that the population was relatively dispersed (one to ten persons per hectare) rather than dense. Instead of fields being outside and politics inside, fields were located throughout the urban infrastructure and among residences. And rather than being small focal points, cities sprawled over 100 km2. To take Tikal as an example, recent survey data has illustrated a network of moats, dwellings, reservoirs, and pyramid clusters that extend out from a single hill for up to 200 km2 into the surrounding landscape. Innovative aerial survey methodologies have now made similar findings elsewhere across the Maya world, from Copán to Caracol. In almost all instances, instead of isolated urban buds, scientists have found vast landscapes of small and large centers connected by dispersed agrarian landscapes, residential areas, causeways, and complex, interlinking systems of dams, reservoirs, sinkholes, channels, and swamps that supported growing populations through even the driest of seasons. As leading “Mayanist” Professor Lisa Lucero of the University of Illinois puts it, “Having been there for over a millennium already, the Classic Maya knew the importance of water and of fertile agricultural soils, the latter dispersed in variously sized pockets, mirrored by a dispersed agricultural settlement. This low-density approach to cities was a logical, innovative solution.”6

  Figure 9.2 The central temples of the pre-Angkorian urban complex of Sambor Prei Kuk, Cambodia. Visualization by Damian Evans from Lidar elevation data acquired by the Cambodian Archaeological Lidar Initiative in 2015

  The Classic Maya also had far more diverse and sophisticated economies than has often been appreciated. Archeobotanists have shown that alongside the key crops, the planting of avocados, pineapples, sunflowers, tomatoes, and manioc added to a more dispersed settlement and lifestyle than conveyed by popular imaginings of endless rows of maize. Analysis of modern forests growing around Classic Maya centers also shows that the occupants of these urban networks actively managed tropical forest plants to promote economically useful species. They did not stop at plants. The Classic Maya also penned, fed, and fattened wild turkeys and deer for use as key protein sources. Overall, instead of rolling agricultural fields of single crops, scientists now present diverse “forest gardens” as the sustaining source of these cities. Based on ethnographic study of and testaments from Maya communities today, this type of cultivation, called milpa (or kol in the local Yukatek language), involves the use of multiple crops and the movement of fields, allowing different parts of the forest to grow back and patches of soil to rest and restock before planting begins in a locality again. We also know that instead of indiscriminately planting in soils of all types, the Classic Maya actually followed rich veins of particularly productive soils known as “mollisols,” giving their field systems a winding appearance that snaked along rivers and up slopes. They even added special plants, like water lilies, to reservoirs. These plants are incredibly sensitive to water quality, only growing under clean conditions, and allowed people to monitor the buildup of stagnant water and thus guard against disease. “Ultimately, the wider Classic Maya landscape can be imagined as a patchwork of seasonal wetlands and well-drained forests used for palms, dyes, fruits, animals and construction materials, and open areas filled with diverse fields (milpas),” states Lisa.7

  The difficulty of maintaining large populations and complicated social and political structures in a highly seasonal tropical landscape, where water was often in demand, did eventually take its toll in many parts of the so-called Maya heartlands. Despite well-accepted catastrophic scenarios, it is immensely unlikely that any single, dramatic drought brought about the end of a given city. Nonetheless, detailed research by climate scientists, working on growing records of past precipitation from lake sediments as well as the gradual buildup of stalagmites in nearby caves, has shown an increasing seasonality in rainfall amounts, an increasing number of droughts, and a gradual downward trend in precipitation. The extent of pre-Columbian deforestation is not agreed upon. However, pollen records from sediment cores from throughout the southern lowlands suggest varying degrees of deforestation and forest management at each of the hundreds of Maya centers, which, in some cases, may have exacerbated climatic drying. In the southern lowlands, where surface water was hard to find at the best of times, many cities, including Tikal, saw failing agricultural returns, growing malnourishment, and stress. Since kings claimed such close ties to the gods, in the face of droughts and failed crops, their source of political power was called into question, especially as intercity violence grew more frequent. People refused to work on monuments, seeing that they made no difference. Ceremonial centers were abandoned in the southern Maya lowlands, the ruins left for scientists arriving centuries later. Looking at the sequences of certain sites, this may certainly seem like a rapid, uncompromising disaster. But was it really? Given such long-term Classic Maya knowledge of their ecosystems, their well-tuned economies, and their sophisticated water management, things that twenty-first-century urban systems may often lack, is a sweeping, rapid “collapse” truly likely?8

  In fact, Maya centers actually flourished into the Postclassic period (AD 900–1520) (Chichén Itzá, Uxmal), some right up to Spanish arrival, simply locating themselves near sinkholes fed by groundwater or coasts in the northern lowlands, near the relatively few lakes and rivers in the southern lowlands, and later in the highlands of Guatemala (e.g., Q’umarkaj [Utatlán]). Even in the drying southern lowlands, we can see that the wealthy and powerful suffered—but what about everyone else? In many areas, it actually seems like the independent farmers, who were the key links in the chain of vast Classic Maya urban systems, persisted, albeit with much-reduced population sizes. In the region of El Pilar, surrounding the ceremonial center of Tikal, “forest gardens” were managed by farming communities. Remarkably, this management and the presence of large numbers of farmers continued through the rise and fall of Tikal itself. This diverse milpa agriculture also persists among the Indigenous Maya communities that still occupy many parts of the region today. These groups still practice traditional manufacturing and landscape management. Urban archeologists, like our societies in general, tend to focus on the “rich” remains of elite structures, which can make a big media splash and leave a big mark. But when your tropical city is built on sprawling networks of independent farmers and craftspeople, you can often miss the remarkable resilience inherent in the foundations of the system beyond the more obvious stars of the show.9

  THE GREATER ANGKOR region of Cambodia is another prominent, tourist-attracting set of ruins emerging out of a “jungle.” Gap-yearing students, jetsetters, elderly tour groups, and interested locals all flock toward the prominent, monkey-covered temple of Angkor Wat, which became the religious center of the Khmer Empire in the twelfth century AD. Few of them, however, realize that this monumental shrine is actually just the tip of the Angkorian iceberg. Urbanism began to emerge in this part of the world from the first millennium BC. Initially this was based on walled and moated towns of five to twenty km2, with a focus on the management of water to feed their growing rice fields through the often severe regional dry season, which
boomed into the first millennium AD. From the eighth century AD, the region of Angkor took this to new levels. Beginning as two separate centers, Yasodharapura, the new capital of the Khmer Empire, the dominant state of mainland Southeast Asia at the time, had formed by the ninth century AD. The capital, characterized by massive earthen-built reservoirs known as barays and a series of walled administrative palaces and Buddhist and Hindu temples, thrived for half a millennium until the fourteenth century AD. Previously, like tourists do today, many archeologists had focused on the seemingly important, compact “ceremonial” centers, like Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat, built by the various rulers of the empire.10

  But then two things happened. First, the French archeologist Christophe Pottier and his local collaborators undertook decades of on-the-ground survey work, even in the face of security issues with holdouts from the Khmer Rouge rebellion in the 1990s. In doing so, they were able to plot the presence of vast numbers of construction features, large and small, across an entire Greater Angkor region. Second, a new method arrived: light detection and ranging (LiDAR). One of the leading experts applying this methodology in tropical archeology today is Dr. Damian Evans of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, Paris. Dense vegetation has often hindered the identification of ancient buildings in tropical forests, particularly in Southeast Asia, where dwellings were often constructed from wood or bamboo, leaving behind just subtle changes in soil color or elevation. However, as Damian describes, “LiDAR allows us to virtually ‘strip away’ vegetation. Using a laser scanner attached to an aircraft, we carpet the terrain below us with pulses of lasers, collecting billions of points. Some bounce back from the trees but others slip through, allowing us to build a model of what lies beneath.” What they have found at Angkor is simply mind-boggling: an urban residential area of over 1,000 km2 has emerged alongside a modified landscape of 3,000 km2. This makes Greater Angkor the most extensive preindustrial settlement complex anywhere on the face of the Earth, and larger even than cities such as Paris today. It also revolutionizes our understanding of how this ancient megacity operated.11