Secrets of the Dead: "Hidden in the Amazon" (3BM Television, Channel 4, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, WNET, PBS, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The Secrets of the Dead episode that followed, “Hidden in the Amazon,” was about the growing evidence that, contrary to the popular myth that the Amazon rainforest was “untouched by man” until white people came to the Western Hemisphere in the late 15th century, there were actually quite advanced human cultures and civilizations there. Modern scientists estimate that there were between 8 and 10 million people living in the Amazon rainforests in 1492, when Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World and started the process of white colonization. The discoveries that led to this conclusion were made possible by improved technology – and, ironically, by the deforestation program of various Brazilian governments, notably the recently defeated President Jair Bolsonaro, which by cutting down and destroying great swaths of the rainforest also exposed the evidence of extensive human habitation in the pre-Columbian era. Among the technological improvements were the development of aerial surveys using laser beams to detect differences in vegetation in various parts of the Amazon, which the researchers attribute to active human involvement in reshaping the notoriously acidic soil of the Amazon to something in which food crops could be grown. The key indication of human involvement is the existence of something called terra preta (Portuguese for “black earth”) in certain regions of the Amazon.

Indigenous Amazonians mixed charcoal and human waste into the ground to leach out the soil’s impurities and make it fertile for crops people could actually eat. They would set up villages in the middle of the rainforest and then build rings around each village where they purified the soil into terra preta and then did their farming – and though the Amazonians died out in the 1600’s, largely because the white Europeans introduced infectious diseases to which the native populations’ immune systems offered no resistance, they left traces behind: stands of unique vegetation unlike that which prevailed elsewhere in the rainforest where humans hadn’t settled. Most of the research was done in a border region between Brazil and French Guiana – which probably explains why many of the interviews for this show were conducted in French rather than English or Portuguese. Among the most spectacular sites were cave paintings rivaling the famous ones in Lascaux, France – which we were told are under threat from colonies of highly dangerous wasps which like to build their nests on the walls that the indigenous people painted over 10,000 years ago. Given that the stings from these wasps can be deadly, I was surprised that the scientists researching the cave paintings were wearing normal clothes rather than the apiary costumes worn by beekeepers.

Also found among the Amazon cave dwellings were elaborately decorated pottery urns which seem to have been made to house the remains of their dead. The indigenous Amazonians had figured out how to make ceramics – including how to fire them so they became watertight and permanent – at least as early as Asians and Europeans started doing that. “Hidden in the Amazon” was a remarkable episode that showed that we don’t always know as much as we think we do, and in particular about an area of the earth that had long been considered “unspoiled by man” until modern technologies and the discoveries made with it showed that it wasn’t so “unspoiled” after all and it was the invasion by white people and their diseases that so utterly wiped out the indigenous people of the Amazon that for centuries they were assumed never to have existed at all.