The Vanished Cities of the Amazon: Evidence of Pre-Columbian Civilizations

Introduction

When Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana led the first European expedition down the length of the Amazon River in 1542, his chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal recorded something extraordinary. The expedition encountered numerous large settlements, densely populated villages, and what appeared to be sophisticated civilizations along the riverbanks. Carvajal described towns stretching for miles, roads leading inland, and populations so numerous that the expedition feared attack at every bend in the river. Yet when subsequent waves of European explorers ventured into the same regions in the following centuries, they found an almost empty wilderness, with only scattered indigenous groups living in small, mobile communities. This dramatic discrepancy led historians to dismiss the early accounts as fantasy or exaggeration for more than four centuries.

Today, a revolution in Amazonian archaeology has vindicated the early chroniclers. Using technologies like LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), ground-penetrating radar, and systematic soil analysis, researchers have discovered overwhelming evidence of large, complex pre-Columbian societies throughout the Amazon basin. The cities didn’t disappear because they never existed—they vanished because European contact triggered one of history’s most catastrophic demographic collapses, with disease spreading far ahead of the colonizers themselves.

The Early Chronicles: Dismissed as Fantasy

Francisco de Orellana’s 1542 expedition departed from Quito in Ecuador, crossed the Andes, and descended the Amazon to its mouth at the Atlantic Ocean. Throughout this journey, Carvajal’s account describes repeated encounters with substantial settlements. Near the confluence of the Negro and Amazon rivers, he wrote of villages that extended for fifteen to twenty miles along the riverbanks, with roads six feet wide leading into the interior. The expedition reported seeing large plazas, ceremonial structures, and populations that could muster thousands of warriors.

The accounts described sophisticated agricultural systems, with evidence of large-scale cultivation visible from the river. The chroniclers noted ceramic production, textile manufacture, and what appeared to be hierarchical societies with distinct social classes. Some settlements featured defensive palisades and showed evidence of urban planning. In one particularly detailed passage, Carvajal described a settlement ruled by a female chieftain, which gave rise to the Amazon’s name through association with the classical Greek Amazons.

Other early explorers provided similar accounts. Cristóbal de Acuña, who descended the Amazon in 1639, described numerous villages and noted the abundance of food production. He estimated millions of inhabitants along the main river and its tributaries. Jesuit missionaries in the early colonial period also reported finding substantial indigenous populations, though already in decline.

Yet as the decades passed and European presence in the Amazon increased, explorers found something very different. The forests seemed largely empty, with only small, scattered groups practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the prevailing view held that the Amazon had always been a “counterfeit paradise”—an environment too poor in resources to support large populations. The early accounts were dismissed as the exaggerations of glory-seeking conquistadors or the misinterpretations of men unused to the tropical environment. This view persisted well into the twentieth century and shaped both academic understanding and conservation policy.

The Demographic Catastrophe

The key to understanding the vanished cities lies in recognizing the scale of the demographic collapse that followed European contact. While the conquistadors brought violence and enslavement, the greatest killer traveled invisibly ahead of them: disease. Smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, and other Old World pathogens to which indigenous Americans had no immunity spread rapidly through the densely populated settlements, often reaching communities that had never seen a European.

Epidemiological evidence suggests that diseases could spread hundreds of miles ahead of direct contact, carried by trade networks and transmitted from group to group. When Orellana descended the Amazon in 1542, he may have been witnessing populations already affected by diseases that had spread from the Caribbean and coastal regions. By the time subsequent explorers arrived, multiple waves of epidemics had devastated the population.

Conservative estimates suggest that 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas died in the century following 1492. In the Amazon, with its connected river systems serving as highways for both trade and disease, the collapse may have been even more severe. Entire societies disappeared within decades. The survivors, their social structures shattered and their numbers catastrophically reduced, often abandoned the large settlements and dispersed into smaller, more mobile groups better suited to a drastically reduced population.

This demographic collapse had profound ecological consequences. The indigenous peoples of the Amazon had actively managed the forest for thousands of years, creating what some scholars now call an “anthropogenic landscape.” With the population gone, the forest reclaimed the settlements. Within a generation or two, the built environment of pre-Columbian Amazonia largely vanished beneath regrowth, leaving little visible trace for later explorers who assumed the forest had always been pristine wilderness.

Archaeological Evidence: Vindication Through Technology

The rehabilitation of the early chronicles began in the late twentieth century, but accelerated dramatically in the twenty-first with the application of new technologies. The most revolutionary tool has been LiDAR, which uses laser pulses to create detailed three-dimensional maps of ground surfaces even beneath dense forest canopy. LiDAR surveys have revealed earthworks, settlement patterns, and agricultural infrastructure across vast areas of the Amazon that appear to be pristine wilderness at ground level.

In the Llanos de Moxos region of Bolivia, aerial surveys and LiDAR have documented over 6,000 square kilometers of pre-Columbian earthworks, including raised agricultural fields, fish weirs, causeways, and settlement mounds. These features represent sophisticated water management systems that allowed intensive agriculture in seasonally flooded environments. The scale suggests populations far larger than previously imagined for this region.

In the upper Xingu region of Brazil, archaeologists have documented evidence of large integrated settlements connected by roads and organized around central plazas. At least nineteen major settlements have been identified, some covering several square kilometers and connected by a network of roads up to five meters wide. The settlements show careful planning, with residential areas, defensive structures, and specialized activity areas. Population estimates for the entire Upper Xingu complex in pre-Columbian times range from 30,000 to 50,000 people.

Perhaps the most dramatic discoveries have come from the southwestern Amazon, particularly in areas that are now part of Brazil and Bolivia. In these regions, LiDAR has revealed hundreds of previously unknown earthwork structures, including geometric enclosures, moats, and raised platforms. Some of these structures are enormous—geometric earthworks called geoglyphs can span 300 meters in diameter. The geoglyphs appear to have served ceremonial or ritual purposes and suggest a level of social organization and labor mobilization that contradicts earlier assumptions about Amazonian societies.

Terra Preta: Agricultural Innovation

One of the most significant discoveries supporting the existence of large Amazonian populations is terra preta de índio, or “Indian black earth.” Terra preta is an anthropogenic soil, deliberately created by pre-Columbian peoples through the addition of charcoal, bone, pottery fragments, and organic waste. These enriched soils are dramatically more fertile than the naturally poor soils of the Amazon and can remain productive for centuries.

Terra preta deposits are found throughout the Amazon basin, often marking the locations of former settlements. Some deposits extend over several hectares and can be up to two meters deep. The ubiquity of these soils indicates that pre-Columbian peoples engaged in sustained, intensive agriculture that could support large populations. The creation of terra preta required specific knowledge and techniques, suggesting sophisticated agricultural systems that contradicts the image of Amazonian peoples as simple hunter-gatherers practicing only slash-and-burn agriculture.

Archaeological analysis of terra preta sites often reveals evidence of dense occupation, including post holes from structures, ceramic debris, and food remains. The distribution of these sites along major rivers corresponds closely with the locations of settlements described in the early colonial chronicles. Some estimates suggest that as much as ten percent of the Amazon basin shows evidence of pre-Columbian human modification.

Rewriting Amazonian History

The accumulating evidence has forced a fundamental reassessment of pre-Columbian Amazonian history. Rather than a pristine wilderness sparsely populated by small groups, the Amazon now appears to have hosted numerous complex societies with substantial populations, intensive agriculture, and significant environmental modification. These societies developed sophisticated adaptations to the Amazonian environment, creating sustainable systems that supported large populations for centuries.

The new understanding has important implications for conservation and environmental policy. The Amazon that Europeans encountered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not a pristine wilderness but rather a landscape recovering from catastrophic depopulation. Many of the plant and animal distributions that conservationists assumed were “natural” may actually reflect thousands of years of indigenous management. Species like Brazil nuts, açaí palms, and cacao show clustered distributions that suggest human cultivation and dispersal. The “wilderness” that needed protection was itself partly a human creation.

This recognition doesn’t diminish the importance of conservation but adds complexity to it. It suggests that sustainable human presence in the Amazon is not inherently destructive and that indigenous management practices developed over millennia may offer valuable lessons for contemporary land use. The catastrophe wasn’t indigenous occupation but rather the colonial violence and disease that destroyed these societies and the ecological knowledge they possessed.

Specific Examples of Vanished Cities

Several specific locations mentioned in early chronicles have now been identified and partially documented through archaeological research, providing concrete examples of the vanished cities.

Santarém Region: Near the modern city of Santarém at the confluence of the Tapajós and Amazon rivers, Carvajal described extensive settlements that the expedition feared to approach because of the size of the population. Archaeological work in this region has revealed a major pre-Columbian center with sophisticated ceramic traditions, known today as the Santarém culture. Evidence indicates continuous occupation from around 1000 CE until the colonial period, with a population that may have numbered in the tens of thousands. The site shows evidence of social stratification, specialized craft production, and long-distance trade networks. Ceramic styles found at Santarém have been discovered hundreds of kilometers away, suggesting either trade or political influence over a wide area.

The settlement featured massive middens (refuse heaps) containing millions of ceramic fragments, indicating intensive pottery production. The ceramics themselves, known for their elaborate incised and modeled decoration, represent some of the finest pre-Columbian art in the Amazon. The scale of production and the sophistication of the designs point to a society with specialist artisans and significant wealth concentration. Recent excavations have also uncovered evidence of large communal structures and elite residences that differ significantly from common dwellings.

Marajó Island: At the mouth of the Amazon, the island of Marajó was home to the Marajoara culture, which flourished from approximately 400 to 1400 CE. Early colonial accounts describe substantial populations on the island, though by the seventeenth century these were already in severe decline. Archaeological investigations beginning in the nineteenth century and intensifying in recent decades have revealed an elaborate culture that constructed enormous earthen mounds, some reaching ten meters in height and covering several hectares.

These mounds served as settlement platforms, raising communities above seasonal floodwaters while also serving as symbols of power and prestige. The mounds required enormous labor investments, suggesting centralized political authority and the ability to mobilize large workforces. Associated with the mounds are sophisticated ceramic traditions, including elaborately decorated burial urns that suggest complex mortuary rituals and beliefs about the afterlife. The Marajoara culture also created extensive systems of raised agricultural fields and fish weirs, demonstrating sophisticated environmental management.

Population estimates for Marajó at its height range from 100,000 to perhaps several hundred thousand people, making it one of the largest population centers in the pre-Columbian Americas. The decline of this culture before the arrival of Europeans remains debated—some evidence suggests environmental changes or internal conflict, while other data indicates the culture persisted until struck by diseases spreading from initial coastal contacts.

Kuhikugu: In the upper Xingu basin of Brazil, archaeologists have extensively documented the site complex known as Kuhikugu, occupied from approximately 1250 to 1650 CE. This site confirms descriptions from later explorers who noted organized settlements in the region. Kuhikugu consists of at least nineteen villages connected by roads, surrounded by palisades, and organized around central plazas. The settlement pattern suggests sophisticated urban planning, with residential zones, elite compounds, and ceremonial areas clearly demarcated.

The roads connecting settlements are particularly remarkable—engineered features up to five meters wide and running perfectly straight for kilometers, with integrated bridges over streams. The network facilitated movement and trade while also serving as symbolic connections between communities. Defensive ditches and palisades surrounding settlements indicate organized warfare and the need for protection, suggesting competition for resources or territory.

The region around Kuhikugu shows extensive environmental modification. Researchers have identified large areas of terra preta, managed forests with concentrations of useful plant species, and systems of ponds for aquaculture. The scale of modification suggests populations far exceeding current indigenous communities in the region. Conservative estimates place the population of the integrated Kuhikugu settlements at 30,000 to 50,000, with some researchers suggesting even higher figures.

The Province of Omagua: One of the most extensively described regions in the early chronicles was the so-called Province of Omagua, located along the Amazon in what is now western Brazil and eastern Peru. Carvajal’s account describes this region as having the most extensive settlements encountered during the expedition, with villages so close together that one was visible from another for days of travel. The chronicler noted large populations, abundant food supplies, and impressive ceramics.

For centuries, this account seemed pure fantasy—the region appeared to be sparsely populated forest with no sign of the described cities. However, recent archaeological surveys using both ground-based investigation and remote sensing have begun to identify evidence of substantial pre-Columbian occupation. Terra preta deposits mark former settlement locations along the river bluffs, and ceramic finds match styles described and sometimes illustrated in colonial accounts.

The Omagua people themselves survived in reduced numbers until the eighteenth century, but epidemics and slave raiding had already shattered their society by the early seventeenth century. Jesuit missionaries in the 1600s noted that the Omagua spoke of formerly having “countless” people and controlling extensive territories, but that disease had reduced them to a fraction of their former population. By the time systematic exploration of the region began in the nineteenth century, the Omagua culture had essentially disappeared, leaving only scattered descendants and the terra preta marking their former cities.

The Nature of Amazonian Complexity

The emerging picture of pre-Columbian Amazonian societies challenges many assumptions about cultural development and environmental determinism. For decades, anthropological theory held that tropical forest environments couldn’t support complex societies because the poor soils prevented intensive agriculture and the lack of easily domesticated animals limited surplus production. The Amazon became the textbook example of environmental limitations on cultural complexity.

This view is now recognized as profoundly mistaken. Amazonian peoples developed their own forms of complexity adapted to their specific environment. Rather than clearing large areas for agriculture as in temperate regions, they modified the forest itself, creating managed landscapes that maintained forest cover while increasing useful plant densities. Rather than relying on large domesticated animals, they managed fish populations, cultivated insects for protein, and maintained game populations through controlled burning and forest management.

The political organization of these societies remains debated, but evidence points to chiefdoms or early states with hereditary leadership, social stratification, and regional integration. The large earthworks, road systems, and integrated settlement patterns indicate centralized planning and the ability to mobilize labor on a substantial scale. Trade networks connected communities across hundreds of kilometers, moving exotic raw materials, finished goods, and probably ideas and innovations.

These societies were not simply smaller versions of the empires and states known from the Andes or Mesoamerica—they represented alternative paths to complexity, adapted to riverine tropical environments. Their collapse following European contact erased not just millions of people but also thousands of years of accumulated ecological knowledge and cultural innovation.

Why the Cities Vanished So Completely

Understanding why these cities left so little visible trace requires considering several factors working in concert. First and most important was the speed and completeness of the demographic collapse. When 90 to 95 percent of the population dies within a few generations, social institutions disintegrate. Craft specialization, maintained through apprenticeship, disappears. Oral histories and technical knowledge die with knowledge keepers. Trade networks collapse. The survivors, their numbers drastically reduced, often abandon fixed settlements for more mobile lifestyles better suited to small populations.

Second, the Amazonian environment rapidly reclaims abandoned structures. Unlike stone architecture, which can survive for centuries, the materials used in Amazonian construction—wood, palm thatch, earth, and plant fibers—decompose quickly in the hot, humid climate. A wooden structure abandoned in the Amazon can essentially disappear within decades, leaving only subtle soil changes and the occasional post hole to mark its location. Even massive earthworks become obscured by vegetation and erosion.

Third, the surviving indigenous populations had every reason to hide from European contact. Colonial slavers raided indigenous communities for centuries, carrying off captives to work in plantations, mines, and households throughout the Americas. Missionaries forcibly relocated communities to missions where disease and cultural suppression continued the collapse. Those who could flee did so, abandoning riverbank locations for more remote forest areas where they could avoid detection. This retreat further removed evidence of the pre-contact population from European view.

Fourth, European settlers who moved into the Amazon had no framework for recognizing what they were seeing. Lacking knowledge of pre-Columbian societies and assuming indigenous peoples were “primitive,” they failed to recognize modified soils, managed forests, or earth features as human-made. Subtle features like terra preta were simply used as good agricultural soil without recognition of their anthropogenic origin. Even obvious features like large geometric earthworks were often attributed to natural processes or mysterious ancient peoples rather than to the ancestors of contemporary indigenous communities.

Finally, there was an ideological dimension to the erasure. Colonial authorities and, later, national governments had vested interests in portraying the Amazon as empty wilderness available for exploitation and colonization. Recognizing substantial pre-Columbian populations and their prior claims to the land would have complicated colonial and national narratives of development and progress. The “empty wilderness” narrative served economic and political purposes that acknowledging vanished cities would have undermined.

Contemporary Implications

The recognition of vanished Amazonian cities has profound implications for contemporary debates about indigenous rights, environmental conservation, and sustainable development. Indigenous peoples have long maintained oral traditions describing large populations, extensive settlements, and sophisticated environmental management in their ancestral territories. For centuries, these traditions were dismissed by outsiders as mythology or exaggeration. The archaeological evidence now confirms that indigenous peoples have been accurate historians of their own past.

This vindication strengthens arguments for indigenous land rights and self-governance. The societies that created the pre-Columbian landscapes were the ancestors of contemporary indigenous communities. Their descendants have inherited not only genetic but also cultural and intellectual legacies that connect them to these vanished cities. Recognition of this continuity supports indigenous claims to traditional territories and validates indigenous environmental knowledge as sophisticated and effective.

For conservation, the new understanding suggests that indigenous management practices may offer viable models for sustainable use of Amazonian resources. The pre-Columbian Amazon supported populations possibly numbering in the millions while maintaining forest cover and biodiversity. This suggests that human presence and environmental health are not inherently contradictory in the Amazon. Conservation strategies that exclude human communities may be misguided, while approaches that incorporate indigenous land management could be more effective.

The story of the vanished cities also serves as a cautionary tale about the fragility of civilizations and the consequences of disease and colonial violence. The societies that flourished in the Amazon for millennia were destroyed not by any inherent weakness but by the catastrophic accident of lacking immunity to Old World diseases. Their destruction represents an incalculable loss of human knowledge, cultural diversity, and historical experience.

Conclusion

The early European explorers who described extensive settlements, large populations, and sophisticated societies in the Amazon were not fantasists or liars—they were witnesses to civilizations in their final moments. What they saw were populations already devastated by disease, social structures beginning to collapse, and settlements soon to be abandoned. Within generations, the cities they described had largely vanished, reclaimed by the forest and erased from European historical memory.

The rediscovery of these vanished cities through modern archaeology represents one of the most significant revisions of historical understanding in recent decades. It transforms the Amazon from a pristine wilderness to a humanized landscape, from a region too poor to support complexity to one of the

Bibliography

LiDAR Discoveries and Recent Archaeological Research

1. Prümers, Heiko, Carla Jaimes Betancourt, José Iriarte, Mark Robinson, and Martin Schaich. “Lidar Reveals Pre-Hispanic Low-Density Urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon.” Nature 606 (2022): 325–28. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04780-4.
2. Iriarte, José, et al. “Pre-Columbian Earth-Builders Settled Along the Entire Southern Rim of the Amazon.” Nature Communications 9 (2018): 1125. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-03510-7.
3. Peripato, Vinicius, et al. “More Than 10,000 Pre-Columbian Earthworks Are Still Hidden Throughout Amazonia.” Science 382, no. 6666 (2023): 103–09. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade2541.
4. Rostain, Stéphen, et al. “Laser Mapping Reveals Oldest Amazonian Cities, Built 2500 Years Ago.” Science 383, no. 6680 (2024): 183–89. https://www.science.org/content/article/laser-mapping-reveals-oldest-amazonian-cities-built-2500-years-ago.
5. Stenborg, Per, Henrik Schaan, and Márcio Lima. “Contours of the Past: LiDAR Data Expands the Limits of Late Pre-Columbian Human Settlement in the Santarém Region, Lower Amazon.” Journal of Field Archaeology 43, no. 1 (2018): 44–57. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00934690.2017.1417198.
6. Handwerk, Brian. “Lost Cities of the Amazon Discovered From the Air.” Smithsonian Magazine, May 26, 2022. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lost-cities-of-the-amazon-discovered-from-the-air-180980142/.

Early Chronicles of the Amazon

7. Carvajal, Gaspar de. Relación del nuevo descubrimiento del famoso río Grande que descubrió por muy gran ventura el capitán Francisco de Orellana [Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River Which Was Discovered by Great Good Fortune by Captain Francisco de Orellana]. 1542. Edited and translated by José Toribio Medina. In The Discovery of the Amazon: According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents. New York: American Geographical Society, 1934.
8. Acuña, Cristóbal de. Nuevo descubrimiento del gran río de las Amazonas [New Discovery of the Great River of the Amazons]. Madrid, 1641. Translated by Clements R. Markham. In Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, 1539, 1540, 1639, 41–142. London: Hakluyt Society, 1859.
9. Medina, José Toribio, ed. The Discovery of the Amazon: According to the Account of Friar Gaspar de Carvajal and Other Documents. Translated by Bertram T. Lee and H. C. Heaton. New York: American Geographical Society, 1934.
10. Markham, Clements R., ed. Expeditions into the Valley of the Amazons, 1539, 1540, 1639. London: Hakluyt Society, 1859. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Terra Preta and Pre-Columbian Agriculture

11. Glaser, Bruno. “Prehistorically Modified Soils of Central Amazonia: A Model for Sustainable Agriculture in the Twenty-First Century.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 362, no. 1478 (2007): 187–96. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2006.1978.
12. McMichael, Crystal H., et al. “Predicting Pre-Columbian Anthropogenic Soils in Amazonia.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 281, no. 1777 (2014): 20132475. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3896013/.
13. Schmidt, Morgan J., and Michael J. Heckenberger. “Amerindian Anthrosols: Amazonian Dark Earth Formation in the Upper Xingu.” In Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision, edited by William I. Woods et al., 163–91. Dordrecht: Springer, 2009.
14. Sombroek, Wim G. “Amazon Soils: A Reconnaissance of the Soils of the Brazilian Amazon Region.” Wageningen: Centre for Agricultural Publications and Documentation, 1966.
15. Woods, William I., and Joseph M. McCann. “The Anthropogenic Origin and Persistence of Amazonian Dark Earths.” Yearbook, Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers 25 (1999): 7–14.
16. Goldberg, Sam, and Morgan Schmidt. “Digging Deep: Investigating Manmade Black Soil of the Amazon.” Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), MIT, 2019. https://jwafs.mit.edu/news/2019/digging-deep-investigating-manmade-black-soil-amazon.

Upper Xingu and Kuhikugu

17. Heckenberger, Michael J., J. Christian Russell, Carlos Fausto, Joshua R. Toney, Morgan J. Schmidt, Edithe Pereira, Bruna Franchetto, and Afukaka Kuikuro. “Pre-Columbian Urbanism, Anthropogenic Landscapes, and the Future of the Amazon.” Science 321, no. 5893 (2008): 1214–17.
18. Heckenberger, Michael J., et al. “Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland?” Science 301, no. 5640 (2003): 1710–14.
19. Heckenberger, Michael J. The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place, and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, A.D. 1000–2000. New York: Routledge, 2005.
20. Heckenberger, Michael J. “Lost Cities of the Amazon.” Scientific American 301, no. 2 (2009): 64–71.
21. Heckenberger, Michael J., and Eduardo G. Neves. “Amazonian Archaeology.” Annual Review of Anthropology 38 (2009): 251–66.

Charles C. Mann’s 1491

22. Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005. Second edition, New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
23. Mann, Charles C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York: Knopf, 2011.

Population Collapse and Disease

24. Dobyns, Henry F. “Their Number Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America.” Studies in Anthropology. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.
25. Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972.
26. Crosby, Alfred W. “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33, no. 2 (1976): 289–99.
27. Cook, Noble David, and W. George Lovell, eds. “Secret Judgments of God”: Old World Disease in Colonial Spanish America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Reprint, 2001.
28. Denevan, William M., ed. The Native Population of the Americas in 1492. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976. Second edition, 1992.
29. Koch, Alexander, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis. “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas After 1492.” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36.
30. Lovell, W. George. “Epidemic Disease and Indigenous Survival: Research Findings for Colonial Latin America.” Latin American Research and History Matters, September 14, 2023. https://lrhmatters.com/drivers-of-health/epidemic-disease-and-indigenous-survival-in-colonial-latin-america.

Marajó Island and Marajoara Culture

31. Roosevelt, Anna Curtenius. Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on Marajó Island, Brazil. San Diego: Academic Press, 1991.
32. Roosevelt, Anna Curtenius. “The Development of Prehistoric Complex Societies: Amazonia, a Tropical Forest.” In Complex Polities in the Ancient Tropical World, edited by Elisabeth A. Bacus and Lisa J. Lucero, 13–33. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association No. 9. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association, 1999.
33. Meggers, Betty J., and Clifford Evans. Archaeological Investigations at the Mouth of the Amazon. Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 167. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1957.
34. Schaan, Denise P. “The Nonagricultural Chiefdoms of Marajó Island.” In Handbook of South American Archaeology, edited by Helaine Silverman and William H. Isbell, 339–57. New York: Springer, 2008.
35. Schaan, Denise P. Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia: Historical Ecology of Social Complexity. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2012.

General Works on Pre-Columbian Amazonia

36. Erickson, Clark L., and William Balée, eds. Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
37. McEwan, Colin, Cristiana Barreto, and Eduardo Neves, eds. Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil. London: British Museum Press, 2001.
38. Neves, Eduardo G., and Michael J. Heckenberger, eds. Amazonia 2017: Complexity and Diversity in the Lowlands of South America. Bonn: Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt, 2019.
39. Roberts, Patrick. Tropical Forests in Prehistory, History, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
40. Rostain, Stéphen. “Islands in the Rainforest: Landscape Management in Pre-Columbian Amazonia.” Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Pflanzen 21 (2012): 285–313.