Jungle
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Figure 9.3. Aerial overview of the Angkor Wat temple complex. Damian Evans
As in the case of the Classic Maya, where LiDAR has also exposed vast, settled urban landscapes, rather than being solely composed of compact ceremonial centers, Angkor was another sprawling example of agrarian-based, low-density urbanism. At ceremonial centers like Angkor Thom, LiDAR filled in the apparently spacious courtyards to reveal a densely packed religious support team living in wooden pile houses within the stone walls. Beyond focal points, numerous sprawling domestic mounds, smaller shrines, and rice fields extend from right up against the boundaries of sites like Angkor Wat, out across the lowlands, and into the hills. As in tropical North and Central America, the urban populace used the forests, exploiting fruits in managed orchards, wild palms, and vegetables, ensuring some forest cover persisted. Rivers and ponds provided fish, while zooarcheologists have shown that pigs, cattle, and chickens snuffled, brayed, and clucked through the busy streets. This expansive human and animal population could only be supported among the seasonally dry forests that line the Siem Reap River delta by the human creation of a vast water-drainage system. In addition to buildings, the earlier surveying and later LiDAR work together show a dendritic network of water transport and storage, from giant reservoirs and temple moats to small, locally maintained channels. Ingenious design and application of sandy clay to parts of the probing tendrils of this vast construct allowed it to deal with both droughts and floods, and the Angkorian leviathan persisted through many a dry season and political crisis until the fourteenth century AD.12
Unsurprisingly, this vast urban metropolis placed a strain on the tropical landscape. Human-induced deforestation and soil erosion have left a clear signal in paleoenvironmental records from the region. However, the agrarian urban spread dispersed these impacts across the catchment so that it did not intensively impact any particular area. Angkor’s time did, however, eventually come to an end. During the late fourteenth century AD, increasingly extreme climatic swings between drought and deluge ruptured parts of the water network and took their toll on farming yields. Palaces and temples were abandoned, and the urban landscape broke up as farmers saw no reason to stay within a dysfunctional state-guided system of competing elites. But, again, the result was more interesting than complete “collapse.” The rulers moved to new, more compact cities in the Phnom Penh area, where the current capital of Cambodia still stands to this day. Meanwhile, the diligent farmers populated more numerous small towns along the banks of the Mekong River and Tonlé Sap lake, preferring more stable water courses for their future endeavors. As with the Classic Maya then, the governing system certainly failed, particularly in the wake of climatic challenges facing a region prone to seasonal variation in rainfall. The eventual abandonment and upheaval seen at Greater Angkor is nothing to sniff at. However, the elite thought up a new strategy and moved to new sites of power. Meanwhile, the farmers, who had fueled the sprawl from its beginning, continued on a landscape that had provided for them for so long, albeit focusing their efforts on more profitable areas for cultivation and herding. Once we cast our eyes away from the overgrown walls of temples, then, we can begin to see how Greater Angkor represented a vast, highly resilient approach to urban living in the tropics.13
A comparable state of affairs can also be found in one of the greatest ancient urban tourist attractions in South Asia, Anuradhapura of the UNESCO “Golden Triangle” in Sri Lanka. Construction of this capital of the Sinhalese king Pandukabhaya seems to have begun around 500 BC. Monumental Buddhist temples (“stupas”), including the largest brick structure anywhere in the world, monasteries, palaces, and state-directed reservoirs to support intensive rice agriculture characterize this center from the third century AD. The water “tanks” are particularly impressive, with the largest, Nuwarawewa, built in the first century AD, reaching as large as 9 km2. By the ninth and tenth centuries AD, Anuradhapura dominated the political landscape of the island. The three great monastic centers of the capital could have sustained 30,000 religious worshippers at any given time, documented by a number of immense preserved stone vats that could have each fed rice to 1,000 people every mealtime. Comparably, only 1,000 worshippers were invited into the Hagia Sophia for prayers when it was converted into an active mosque in 2020. However, once again, it has taken dedicated survey work to see past Anuradhapura’s stone and brick behemoths to the 500 km2 sprawl that extended out into the wider countryside, housing an estimated 250,000 people at its peak. That’s an area over four times larger than the modern city of Liverpool. This spread was fed by timber and stone canals that linked the central tanks to water storage constructions in the hills nearly one hundred kilometers away. While these larger layouts were state directed, as at Greater Angkor, small field systems, reservoirs, and alterations to rivers were undertaken by local farming groups that occupied the surrounding landscape, independent of the larger state building works and political power shifts. These farmers also developed gardens and moved their plots of land on a frequent basis to maintain intact parts of dry tropical forest in order to diversify their diets and landscape use beyond rice.14
Political and climatic fluctuations eventually spelled the end of ancient Anuradhapura as a ceremonial and political center. The Sinhalese capital moved first to the nearby Polonnaruwa in the twelfth century AD, before rulers abandoned the drier north altogether by the thirteenth century AD and moved south to the wetter tropical forests of Dambadeniya and eventually Kandy. This may have been stimulated by fluctuations in the Indian Ocean monsoon system, which brought intense drought to the reservoir-dependent cities of the north, a region that faces marked, arid dry seasons in the summer months to this day. Nevertheless, although the state system faded locally, through relocation it persisted in the region as a whole. Furthermore, the more independent farmers once again ploughed their own course beyond the end of the political structure. In the later twelfth century AD, after the rulers had already left, there is evidence that some dogged farmers reoccupied different parts of Anuradhapura and dusted down the monuments. Moreover, although British colonial bureaucrats who arrived in the north in the nineteenth century found ruin, they also found continued small-scale rice farming and water management across the Anuradhapura region, which, incidentally, still persists as a city, albeit fueled by tourism. In fact, having been occupied for around 1,700 years as an urban center, ancient Anuradhapura stood far longer as a Sri Lankan capital than the current city of Colombo, which, while occupied by multicultural traders previously, was only truly established as a major urban center following Portuguese, Dutch, and British colonization from the sixteenth century AD onward. Given that this period is also far longer than most of our European cities have stood the test of time, the Sri Lankan example should once again make us reflect on our common assumptions that tropical forests make bad homes for urbanites.15
THE LOWLAND EVERGREEN and semievergreen rainforests of the Amazon Basin are another challenge altogether for urban societies compared to the seasonally arid dry tropical forests of Central and North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. In fact, the heat, sticky humidity, and acidic, often-flooded soils led some archeologists and anthropologists to assume that both cities and settled agriculture were environmentally impossible. Most surviving Indigenous communities in these forests were, after all, living in small villages with no clear evidence of social hierarchy. Meanwhile, today, expanding infrastructure, development, plantation agriculture, and ranching undoubtedly do untold harm to these environments. Nevertheless, Chapter 7 has already shown us that more innovative, ecologically sensitive paths to food production were underway in the Amazon for much of the Holocene. In fact, renewed survey by a number of dedicated teams of archeologists, anthropologists, environmental scientists, and Indigenous communities, as well as tragic deforestation stripping away protecting forest, has revealed substantial “garden city” landscapes of earthworks, clustered structures, and “road-like” paths across the Amazon Basin. In and aro
und the Xingu River, these settlements reached their peak between AD 1250 and 1650, just prior to European arrival. Intriguingly, they show a similar pattern to the cases of agrarian-based, low-density urbanism we have already visited. In each case, clear, larger towns at central points were surrounded by monumental wooden walls and ditches and connected to a number of satellite villages by pathways cleared through the forest. Instead of resulting in mass deforestation, these settlements were separated by intact forest used for the management of fruit-bearing trees, ponds for farming freshwater turtles and fish, and more open fields for manioc and maize.16
Many years of research have also documented a similar series of urban-like settlements at Marajó Island, right at the mouth of the Amazon River. During the first millennium AD, mound sites were produced by the sustained occupation of large domestic residences, burial areas, elaborate pottery, and waste disposal. Increasing in size and density until the start of the fourteenth century AD, the population in this region at its peak may have been as large as 100,000. Whatever the true size, as in the “garden cities” of the Xingu, archeobotany, zooarcheology, and stable isotope analysis of human remains have shown that the occupants of Marajó Island, as well as the nearby Maracá region, fed themselves through a mixed system of foraging of diverse plants, hunting of wild animals, and fishing or penning of freshwater resources in and around intact rainforest, with some limited cultivation of manioc and maize in more open patches perhaps occurring in addition. The now famous settlements of Santarém, this time at the mouth of the Tapajos River, present a similar scenario. Here, a subsistence combination of manioc and other root crops, alongside tree fruits, fish, and the occasional, perhaps ritual, use of maize, once again drove the success of an interlinking network of denser, occupied settlements and more dispersed satellite villages. Interestingly, in this case, each satellite may have had its own specialism, with some showing a particular focus on the capture of rainforest animals. Ultimately, together these Amazonian forms of agrarian-based, low-density urbanism may have enabled populations of between 8 million and 20 million to have existed across Amazonia by the time of European arrival. Given that the estimated population of all of Europe in AD 1492 was between 70 million and 88 million, this represents a considerable number of human lives sustained within what must undoubtedly be seen as substantial urban types of settlement, albeit very different from our usual ideas of cities.17
Global discussions of urbanism have perhaps neglected these Amazonian examples because they lack the more obvious stone architecture that many more classic examples display. Yet they had their own “monuments.” We met the early cultivators of the Llanos de Moxos and their “forest islands” in Bolivia in Chapter 7. However, from the start of the eleventh century AD, their interventions in the landscape to protect their key crops from flooding became even larger in scale as extensive mounds, earthworks, and ditch systems emerged. More ceremonial constructs by so-called earthwork builders have now been found across northeastern Bolivia, in the uplands of the Ecuadorean Amazon, in Brazil’s Acré State in southwestern Amazonia, and across the eastern Amazon. Perhaps the most resilient “monuments” of Amazonian urban life, however, are the vast changes made to the soils to support increasingly large populations. As Professor Eduardo Neves, a leading Amazonian archeologist based at the University of São Paulo, puts it, “The terra pretas (now known as Amazonian Dark Earth) soils are perhaps the late Holocene Amazon’s greatest legacy.” These clear layers of dark soils, full of charred bones and ceramics left over from occupation, seem to be deliberate attempts to maintain soil fertility through controlled forest burning and the mixing in of fertile waste products. They were likely created by food producers within these wider urban systems, who kept moving their fields around in a so-called slash-and-burn system to try and maintain forest cover and also allow soils to rejuvenate locally every so often. Amazonian Dark Earth soils are almost always found in the growing settlement sites of the first and second millennia AD in the Amazon. “Their enormous extent, now known to span across the eastern and western Amazon, stands as testament to the spread of populations, and their ‘garden cities,’ across this region,” continues Eduardo.18
Beyond their being yet another example of more dispersed and integrated types of urbanism than we are used to, these Amazonian settlements are interesting for another reason. Despite showing many of the hallmarks of urban networks (craft production divided into different, dependent satellites, significant population size, and physical and ecological monuments), they almost completely lack evidence of a ruling class. The sites of Marajó and along the Xingu River have no distinctive fancy “palace” residences, no obvious division of “wealth” in terms of personal property, and no hoarding of elaborate grave goods by certain individuals. “Nobles” and directed “warbands” noted by European chroniclers imply some kind of centralized control, though the biases of those observing could also have impacted these accounts. Indeed, overall, surviving images and feasting contexts seem to be based more on shamanic rituals and interaction with forest environments than a display of overt political power. A similar state of affairs has been documented in subtropical Mali at the site of Jenné-jeno, where large numbers of people, complex satellite settlement networks, and walled mounds appeared by the ninth century AD, seemingly without a clear ruling class. Likewise, archeological records document dispersed but connected settlements in the Middle Senegal Valley throughout the first millennium AD. Ethnography in West Africa, as well as in Bali in Southeast Asia, has shown that complex works and large numbers of people may have been coordinated by a “heterarchy.” In these systems, power is spread more horizontally, rather than vertically, with decisions made by representatives of different crafts, ritualistic specialists, or families. Such a structure may have existed in the archeological examples of Amazonia and West Africa and may even have helped the sustenance and maintenance of widely spread urban populations. Either way, the more obvious divine rulers of the Classic Maya, the Khmer Empire, or Anuradhapura are currently nowhere to be seen.19
The degree to which the “garden cities” and their other urban-like cousins impacted Amazonian environments is currently unclear. Vast earthworks, forest burning to produce human-modified soils and maintain open patches for crops, and the selection of certain economically useful trees must have had some wide-reaching effects, particularly given the potential number of people undertaking these activities. Nonetheless, as of yet, environmental records taken across the Amazon Basin have provided no unified message. Some scientists have argued that, in Bolivia, “earthwork builders” simply used already open grassland landscapes produced by drier climates just before 2,000 years ago. Meanwhile, further south, environmental archives seem to show no evidence of permanent clearance in connection to ceremonial landscape modifications. Others, however, have debated these findings, and the case very much remains open. In general, most records of Amazonian burning during the time frame of these “garden cities” seem to fit with a shifting form of farming (known as “swidden”). The temporary clearance of certain patches for a few years of cultivation, prior to movement to a new area, supported dynamic, mosaic landscapes rather than complete clearance, and no evidence suggests severe soil erosion or environmentally induced collapse. In fact, many of these urban forms had been in place for 1,000 years when European colonists arrived. As we will see in Chapter 10, it was then that everything changed. Ultimately, all that remained were the small villages of Indigenous peoples met by anthropologists in the twentieth century, who assumed them to be timeless and pristine like their forest homes. All traces of their previous urban glories were erased from history until the last three decades of archeological research and scientific methodologies, alongside better consultation of these same Indigenous communities and recognition of their stewardship and knowledge, raised them from the Earth, challenging widely held misconceptions.20
AGRARIAN-BASED, LOW-DENSITY URBANISM does not characterize all ancient cities in the tropics.
Compared to more “compact” city forms, which persisted from 6,000 years ago in the Middle East through to medieval Europe and also emerged in the wake of the fall of some of these monstrous urban expanses in the tropics, it is certainly rarer and, on balance, more prone to disappear from a region. However, agrarian-based, low-density urbanism provides an important avenue for looking at past cities in tropical forests as both obviously possible and incredibly inventive. The diverse use of wild plants and animals in managed forest patches, fishing in rich freshwater settings, and the mobile use of open areas for crops provided sustainable pathways to food production sufficient to fuel what were some of the largest cities in the preindustrial world. Dispersing the impacts of growing populations across satellites tempered the loss of unique tropical biodiversity and soil quality in the face of growing human pressures. They could certainly face challenges, particularly in seasonally dry forests where human-induced defores-