Prehistoric America: An Ecological Perspective

Betty Meggers is an iconic and controversial figure in New World archaeology. She is a hero in Brazil where she and her late husband, archaeologist Clifford Evans, taught master seminars in 1964 which almost all Brazilian archaeologists attended. She founded PRONAPA-Projeto Nacional de Prospecção Arqueologica in 1965-1971 (a long-term collaboration between Brazilian and North American scholars to rapidly survey large tracts of Brazilian territory), and basically created the modern field of Amazonian archaeology. She is beloved by the many Latin American archaeologists whom she generously helped during their research visits to the Smithsonian Institution, where she has worked since 1954. She is deservedly admired by her American colleagues for her pioneering field investigations in the jungles of lowland South America. Yet field data has accumulated in prolific quantities to negate her principal theories.

Prehistoric America purports to be the “third expanded edition” of the first edition published in 1972. Nevertheless, it reproduces verbatim that first edition – save for a new 12-page introduction, which defends the author’s previous ideas while airing a new grievance.

Evaluating Dr Meggers' Argument

The fieldwork that Meggers and Evans undertook on Marajó Island, at the mouth of the Amazon River, beginning in 1948, was directly stimulated by Julian H. Steward’s framework and model for comparatively understanding the cultural evolution of the South American continent. Steward (1946-1950) divided South America into culture areas to which he ascribed interlinked levels of technological and sociopolitical organization: Marginal Tribes, Andean Civilizations, Tropical Forest Tribes, Circum-Caribbean Tribes (see discussion in Silverman 2008, pp. 3-26). In his model and Dr Meggers’ ('Environmental Limitations on the Development of Culture' in American Anthropologist, 56(5):801-824, 1954, 1971, 2009 inter alia) subsequent elaboration, the tropical forest cannot support complex societies because of environmental limitations on agricultural potential. Following Steward ('The Circum-Caribbean Tribes: An Introduction', volume 4, pp 14-15), Dr Meggers consistently argues that the “Tropical Forest pattern” is late, since it would have to postdate the higher level of culture in the Andean area and have time for “deculturation” in the Circum-Caribbean region, and then “further decline in the Tropical Forest.”

But subsequent fieldwork by Donald Lathrap (e.g., 1970), Anna Roosevelt and other scholars too numerous to cite here has demonstrated early and even ancestral patterns of social complexity and dense Amazonian populations based on sustainable agricultural and mixed-economy subsistence strategies. Indeed, on Marajó Island itself, Brazilian archaeologist Denise Schaan (2008, pp. 339-357) has proven the reverse of Dr Meggers’ contention that complex society devolved there after having been brought by colonists from Andean South America. Schaan shows an in situ development of social complexity (see also Roosevelt 1991 and her paper 'The Development of Prehistoric Complex Societies: Amazonia, a Tropical Forest' in Complex Polities in the Ancient Tropical World) that moreover was not predicated on an agricultural economy but rather efficient techniques of water control and good management of aquatic resources.

Then there is the theory for which Meggers is most famous and most condemned, repeated in Prehistoric America from its various prior presentations, beginning in 1958. She claims that pottery-making was introduced to the New World (specifically coastal Ecuador) by cast-adrift Neolithic Jomon fishermen from Japan. Dr Meggers continues to ignore the chronologically earlier evidence of pottery-making elsewhere in Ecuador, Colombia, and the Amazon Basin. And she refuses to acknowledge the strong evidence of sedentary, agricultural – not fishing – communities, with tropical forest-related ceremonial patterns, excavated at inland sites of the Valdivia tradition, which is the one allegedly impacted by the Jomon survivors.

Finally, Dr. Meggers repeats in Prehistoric America some of her other long discredited diffusionist notions, such as a direct historical relationship between Shang civilization of China and Olmec civilization of Mesoamerica, which – with Jomon – is her most egregious contention.

Is it a New Edition or a Reprint?

In addition to simply erroneous ideas, it is inexcusable that Prehistoric America is completely out-of-date save for a passing reference in the new introduction to Caral, an important Late Archaic/Late Preceramic monumental site on the central coast of Peru that pushes back the antiquity of complex sociopolitical organization in the Andes to ca. 3000 BC. Dr Meggers maintains an old interpretation of Classic Maya civilization as being empty ceremonial centers surrounded by dispersed farming settlements. She completely ignores the well published discovery of Monte Verde, in central Chile, which has dramatically transformed archaeological understanding of the initial peopling of the New World. And so on.

Why was Dr Meggers motivated to bring out a third edition of Prehistoric America? The answer can be garnered from the 2009 introduction. She is clearly annoyed with the new school of Amazonian archaeology which propounds a “historical ecology” emphasizing long-term creative human action on the environment, in contrast to the environmental determinism of her form of cultural ecology. As to why a publisher would simply reprint a 1972 volume on archaeology without demanding proof of currency and accuracy is beyond me.

Archaeology Moves On

Archaeology is a dynamic field of great interest to the public as seen in the proliferation of popular venues for its dissemination – whether in fictional or factual form – in movies, television shows, magazines, books. The rewards for finding the first, the greatest, the strangest, etc. are significant for its academic practitioners: fame (in the public sphere), recognition (in the academic world), influence, more grant money, attract graduate students into the fold, and so on.

Yet sanguine scholars realize that the next project can overturn their ideas with new data. Archaeologists need to be prepared for legitimate assault on our cherished theories. Most (but, unfortunately, not all) archaeologists respectfully contextualize their work in the historical sequence in which intellectual platforms developed. This is to say that if a reasonably logical interpretation of a particular set of data was put out by a prior archaeologist on the basis of the data then available to him/her, the scholar cannot be faulted for not knowing the unknown. Rather, a scholar whose ideas are factually disproven will be admired for correcting or modifying an interpretation in the light of new data. Why Dr Meggers, as she approaches her ninetieth birthday, has refused decade after decade to modify her ideas in light of abundant evidence to the contrary simply confounds me.