It’s really tiring to see that every new finding shows us how everything is Eurocentric and problematic. What is the point of putting that vapid moralising into the article? It’s not even that true. Europeans have been searching for cities in the Amazon for hundreds of years and found evidence that they existed.
I was about to start writing exactly this, but didn't want to get into an argument with another Internet stranger about what the unspecified "we" (i.e. the general population) believes nowadays. Even the original explorers of that region, back when it was known as Verzin, were quite objective in their reports.
Pigafetta's Account of Magellan's Voyage may well be an objective report on what was seen in 1519.
The BBC article is on city structures that date to a full thousand years earlier.
If had been written, Pigafetta's Account of Magellan's Ship fitting and Departure wouldn't neccesarily shed light on the state of civilization in Portugal in 500 BCE.
I brought up Pigafetta's account to point out that even five centuries ago, people were capable of making fascinating discoveries and simply stating the objective truth about what they found. Nowadays, the announcement of a discovery is usually paired with hyperbolic statements (e.g. "this changes everything we know about X") and veiled social commentary (e.g. "there is a widely-held Eurocentric view of civilization").
Had the sentence read more like "some academics have a Eurocentric view of civilization", I would probably take that argument at its face. But nowadays, with improvements in education and the vast quantity of good information available to anyone on the Internet, telling your readers that "we are Eurocentric in our view of culture and civilization" is tantamount to calling them ignorant.
Sure, it's absolutely qualifications all the way down;
> five centuries ago, people were capable of making fascinating discoveries and simply stating [their perceived] objective truth about what they found.
As I hope we can agree, Pigafetta with the best intentions in the "New World" was hardly capable of objectively writing anything other than his own perception .. that whole "New World" thing itself is a bit of a tell about contemporary writings on what for the subjects was the same old same old Old World they'd been living in for thousands of years.
> telling your readers that "we are Eurocentric in our view of culture and civilization" is tantamount to calling them ignorant.
The context for that is the BBC directly quoting Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France.
That is absolutely (I would hope) what the Prof said and it gives his opinion on the bulk of his European peers and mentors in studies of ancient civilisation.
It's certainly the case that there are some acedemics who are not Eurocentric in outlook, a large number of those are out in front and in the public eye thanks to what some call "woke politics invading everywhere" but it's entirely possible there is still a dark mass of rarely popularised eurocentric professors of gravitas that create a well others are vocal about escaping from.
I completely agree with your point about Pigafetta only writing from his own perspective. Perhaps a more poignant example was his naming of modern-day Guam as “Isla de Los Robos” (island of thieves) because he could only perceive their communal society as one where people are constantly stealing from each other, despite spending over a month living amongst them while giving accounts of their harmonious society.
As for the general state of academia, I would opine that modern scholarship’s “dark mass” is rooted in postmodernism, and the most successful way to operate as a modern academic is to present all evidence from a racial/colonial perspective. Although your guess is as good as mine, as is the BBC’s, since people also need to contend with the potential Internet backlash from presenting their views nowadays.
The article very clearly is trying to make it sound like we didn't think there were any pre-Columbian cities in the Amazon:
> While we knew about cities in the highlands of South America, like Machu Picchu in Peru, it was believed that people only lived nomadically or in tiny settlements in the Amazon.
Machu Picchu was built in the ~1400s, not long before Magellan's voyage. Bringing that in as the example of the cities we knew about is clearly trying to communicate that we didn't believe in pre-Columbian cities in the Amazon, which is completely false. One example among many:
Which part of the article you linked supports the notion of large well established pre Columbian cities being a generally accepted notion prior to 2000? Indeed which part of that article supports large pre Columbian cities?
Note: I do not dispute such things in the slightest, it's just that your 2005 article strongly supports the notion that until recently there were:
long-held views that the region was sparsely populated by tribal groups who peacefully coexisted with the apparently hostile environment that surrounded them.
The article you linked also supports recent (within past decade) changes in common though to embrace large sedentary populations of people clearing sections of forest for managed agriculture, etc.
That supports large dispersed agrian populations but doesn't go so far as large concentrated urban areas which seems to be what the primary BBC article is attributing to the Prof. in question here.
In the arc of academic studies these are all "recent" changes in the traditional scholastic views .. although admittedly they perhaps originated a little before your own birth?
> although admittedly they perhaps originated a little before your own birth?
I'd started putting together a reply, but this turned me off. I'll just leave a note saying that this is ineffective discourse and you might want to reconsider your approach in the future.
I guess you should probably take it up with Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, who led the research - and who the BBC quotes directly, rather that giving the journalist a kicking.
If the Prof says he was warned against this research at the start of his career because scientists believed no ancient groups had lived in the Amazon. Then this is clearly an interesting new angle. Sorry that you found it too "woke".
If you just read the quote in the article it does look a bit silly. The reason why people warned him and why the field of history was so "eurocentric" is because it is extremely difficult to find evidence in the Amazon. Nobody doubts the existence of Tenochtitlan or Cuzco because we have both written sources and archeological evidence. In this context, complaining about eurocentrism does come across as motivated reasoning.
That depends on who you ask. The term itself tends to be defined by extremes.
Some say that woke are those who consider police brutality a problem.
Others say that woke are those who believe that if you are victim, everything you do is justified, and that your ethnic/sexual/cultural identity is the most important thing about you.
If you want to get better idea of how divisive the whole issue is look up comedian Bill Maher on youtube. He is pretty left, but he's very anti-woke.
> If you want to get better idea of how divisive the whole issue is look up comedian Bill Maher on youtube. He is pretty left, but he's very anti-woke.
He’s a libertarian, which is definitely not left wing.
> Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination". Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as racial injustice, sexism, and denial of LGBT rights. Woke has also been used as shorthand for some ideas of the American Left involving identity politics and social justice, such as white privilege and reparations for slavery in the United States.
The "vapid moralising" is a quote from the person who lead the research. It's in the article because it is the opinion of the person whose work the article is about. Did you want the author to try and create false balance by finding someone to say "we don't have a eurocentric view of civilisation and this finding is nothing new"?
I assume that having worked as an academic in the field of archaeology for the past three decades, the researcher is in a considerably better position to opine on the focus of archaeological research and academic consensus about the Amazon than the average software developer angrily dismissing his views as "woke"...
> the average software developer angrily dismissing his views as "woke"...
What is this supposed to mean? Why are you suggesting that the average "software developer" would view the subject's expressed point of view as "woke" as opposed to a person from any other occupation? Why the hostility towards software developers?
This is board popular with software developers and the top comment on an article about a very interesting archaeological finding is a criticism of the quote of one of the archaeologists for being critical of a Eurocentric view in archaeology.
I am not sure what is meant by "board popular", did you mean to say "broadly popular". At any rate, you have not answered my question. You have simply rephrased what the poster that I responded to above already said.
He meant to say "This board is popular with software engineers", which is way it's straightforward (and often, correct) to assume that posters are software engineers.
But „the focus of archaeological research and academic consensus“ is unrelated to such a broad statement on a supposedly eurocentric view. It‘s like saying we just discovered a new planet last year, very surprisingly, considering the fact that „we“ made Galileo recant. Out of touch with reality and at least 20 years late.
Then, David, I‘m not sure where you are from and perhaps in your country what you call „software developers“ (a term which seems to conveniently exclude yourself, guessing from your username) are _usually_ uneducated people living under a rock, but let me inform you that where I am from this is not the case and many have a wide range of interests and are certainly as qualified as anyone else to have an opinion on what is not a subtle detail of archaeology research but a topic of general interest that happens to be closely connected to politics.
So the original comment raised a valid point, worth discussing.
It is interesting how you consider that the researcher's opinion on the significance of his research and the relative difficulty of obtaining funding is something which should be omitted, whereas someone entirely unconnected with the expedition's dismissal of his comments as 'vapid moralising' is "worth discussing". Perhaps, where you come from, software developers' wide range of interests leads them greater authority than archaeologists on archaeology?
I will grant that (unlike the drive-by culture warring against "being overly PC", the BBC and climate change by other people demonstrating the breadth of their interests elsewhere in the thread) the OP does actually give us something relevant to discuss: the "lost city" in the Xinguano region still occupied by the descendants of the few survivors of contact with Europeans has been "discovered" multiple times during the 20 year period between Rostain's first study of the Upano region and his LiDar survey (Xinguano was covered the exactly same way; just like the trope of changing agriculture-centric views comes up every time Göbekli Tepe or similarly early structures are discussed... without triggering HN). I guess you could stretch those recent discoveries to arguing that there's absolutely no research bias towards Europe and nobody ever conflated the Conquistadors' failure to find cities full of gold in the Amazon Basin with there being no ancient history to find, and it'd be relatively easy to defend the Meggers hypothesis about the unsuitability of the Amazon for major city building by insisting it wasn't Eurocentric, it was just wrong. But nobody seems interested in anything wider than getting angry at the idea Eurocentrism has ever been a thing...
Even though you are not even trying to construct any kind of coherent argument, let me respond with an article by a computer scientist that you apparently so much despise:
Sorry kid, if you meant to convince me you had an interest in archaeology rather than an ignorance of archaeology exceeded only by reflective hatred of thoughtcrime against Eurocentrism, you might have been better off posting pretty much anything else...
Shame, a discussion on the Meggers hypothesis might have actually been interesting, but if you have nothing to offer but distinctly third rate culture war arguments then so be it.
> Prof Rostain says he was warned against this research at the start of his career because scientists believed no ancient groups had lived in the Amazon.
> "But I'm very stubborn, so I did it anyway. Now I must admit I am quite happy to have made such a big discovery," he says.
That explains why researches were nolonger looking for large settlements in the area, but it explains nothing about how basing this decision off of the evidence at hand is "eurocentric". Making a decision based on current evidence is rational. It may mean missing out in some cases, but it is a reasonable choice and has nothing to do with what continent or culture one originates from.
> "This is older than any other site we know in the Amazon. We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation..." says Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, who led the research.
Ironic parts italicized.
He later says that nobody believed in his research. Weird that they made him director of the national center for scientific research with all those crazy, unorthodox ideas nobody agrees with.
To add some context, even if Rostain doesn't actually believe the vapid nonsense about Eurocentrism etc., he is part of a field where it will be costly to not perform these ablutions.
Archaeology / Anthropology have a very fraught relationship with science and reason, sadly.
Now try to watch any nature documentary to calm your nerves after a day in this stressful modern life, and be hit with the mandatory climate change doomsday warnings. Usually at the end of every documentary, so to mitigate any risk that the watcher would have relaxed for a good nights sleep from watching nature.
I recall a conversation I had with a climate researcher some years ago in France that left me surprised. To paraphrase, they explained that forecasting a system as complex as the climate is difficult and naturally leads to many different outcomes.
One subset of those outcomes, is that conditions would arise such that plant development is accelerated, something like a junglification (my word, probably butchering it).
The field of archaeology, along with many other academic disciplines, has historically been influenced by Eurocentric perspectives. This Eurocentrism in archaeology and history is deeply intertwined with the legacies of colonialism and racism. It's important to recognize that the Eurocentric view often incorrectly posits European history and culture as more significant or advanced than others, a perspective that has been perpetuated for centuries.
The roots of Eurocentrism can be traced back to ideologies like white supremacy, which historically asserted the superiority of white Europeans over other races. This belief in racial hierarchy, unfortunately, influenced various scientific and cultural fields, including the interpretation of archaeological findings. For instance, the concept of phrenology, now discredited, was once used to claim inherent intellectual and moral superiority of certain races over others, particularly to justify the superiority of whites over other races.
It's crucial to understand that human civilization has a rich and diverse origin, much of which began in regions outside of Europe. The earliest known civilizations and significant cultural developments originated in various parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The reluctance to acknowledge the contributions and advancements of non-European civilizations often stems from a reluctance to challenge the long-standing narrative of white supremacy.
My God... again and again and again the same backward concept.
The academic disciplines tend to be linked to the context of the world in the specific moment of the history. It's a bad practice to observe the past with the lenses of the future but to use it to create a better perception (a wider one)
To destroy a past view is to lose the lessons learned.
> Archaeology has historically assumed that European civilization was more significant and advanced than others, a view possibly rooted in ethnocentrism and racism, but findings like these challenge that assumption.
Please just say what you want to say without pasting a bunch of fluff from a chat bot.
Not to say that's what the person you're replying to is doing, but I'm seeing an increasing trend of "sophisticated"-presenting people posting GPT-esque blather with sarcastic intent, in social contexts where they are fully aware that it will be recognized as such, as a way to discredit or demean the point that they're posting about, presumably underscoring some idea that it's just parrot speak anyway.
It amounts to this decade's version of talking in a robotic monotone.
Archaeology has an evidence bias. If there’s a perceived euro-centric emphasis at all, then that can just be attributed to there being more stuff found in the ground.
The truth is that classical archaeology is often just easier, because we have a lot of writing from that time period telling us where battles happened etc.
I’m sure archaeologist would love to open up a whole new front, but it takes time to find stuff that’s hard to find.
I'm confused. Are Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Phoenicians" now suddenly "europeans" just because they are part of the school curriculum that europeans teach to their kids?
Most of the "foundations of western civilisation" is not actually european and that's a well known and accepted fact. Yes, greeks and romans sure, but where did the greeks take the alphabet? It's not controversial, everybody knows that europeans didn't invent writing nor civilization.
It's also unsurprising that the first ancient civilizations to have been discovered by europeans were a) closer to europe (at least in the same continent) and b) not covered by jungle.
If there are people in Europe who are ignorant of that, well that's unfortunate. But the world won't become a better place if all we do is to shame those people with self-flagellatory insinuations that they should re-think their place in the world or whatever. That doesn't work. The natural tendency of people who are looked down upon is to react and entrench themselves even deeper in their positions.
I'd vastly prefer if we just teach to marvel at the beauty of our world and hopefully people who are willing to open up their minds will be attracted to the diversity and depth of our collective human experience and become less and less parochial.
> But the world won't become a better place if all we do is to shame those people with self-flagellatory insinuations that they should re-think their place in the world or whatever.
Do you _actually_ feel shamed by the researcher, or by reading the researcher's opinion? Why feel shame over something you think is wrong? There were no admonishments or moral proclamations -- from whence cometh your shame?
Also, there's some irony that you say "if all we do is shame people..." --- Don't lump me in with you! Isn't that your problem with the quote to begin with?
I personally don't feel ashamed; I personally just feel annoyed but that's not why I'm complaining.
I personally know people who do feel that kind of rhetoric to be a personal attack on their tribe.
I don't personally belong to that tribe or even like that tribe but it exists and they're being energized by all those attacks. I like liberal values and I'm saddened by the rise of reactionaries. If I want to protect liberal values I know that being a jerk against conservatives is counterproductive. I don't care if it feels good, it's not effective.
EDIT: I don't think the researcher or the journalist or you or anybody in particular is at fault here; we all react to the incentives around us. My dig is against the pattern and the perverse incentives that are creating this environment in the first place.
> It's important to recognize that the Eurocentric view often incorrectly posits European history and culture as more significant or advanced than others
1) Western europeans are probably the people least in need of that reminder. They’re probably the least ethnocentric culture in the world, having voluntarily adopted a Mediterranean civil society (from the Romans) and Middle Eastern religion. They’re NPCs in some of their own most important stories.
Maybe it’s different in Europe, but American kids spend inordinate amounts of time learning about other cultures (native Americans, Mesopotamians, Egyptians) and comparatively little time learning about their own. European history isn’t even a part of most American curricula.
2) Which cultures invented rockets and sent people to space?
I'm just an anecdote (but: an anecdote from exactly the kind of school district you're trying to dunk on) but I checked and OPRF students do Euro history the first half of Grade 9 (in World History A), then US History, then again in Grade 11 (if they elect it).
It seems to me that none of the time students spend on subjects like Mesoamerican History are "inordinate", since students take history for a fixed, small number of semesters. You can definitely ordinate the time here.
The "Earliest known" "Civilizations" all in fact exclusively originated in modern day Turkey, the Levant and Mesopotamia. If you're going to speak on archeology you should at least get your facts straight. There are certainly myriad ancient cultures and civilizations found around the world, including in the places you listed, but there is currently no archeological evidence to support the notion that there were any older significant "Civilizations" in places other than the Tas Tepeler region in Turkey (14KYA-12KYA), Jericho (11KYA-10KYA) or Eridu in Mesopotamia (7500KYA). There may be older civilizations found elsewhere, but as of yet archeology has yet to find any evidence of them, so it's disingenuous at best to claim any evidence of any civilizations found elsewhere indicates they are the "Earliest known."
Calling archaeology and history "deeply entwined" with white supremacy is extremely inaccurate. You can certainly find examples of biased historical perspectives going all the way back to Herodotus (known both as the "father of history" and the "father of lies" by his contemporaries). But to apply that categorization to every European explorer is modern propaganda that the "woke" crowd tends to eat up.
I was born in India, and the best resources I have to learn about the history of my ancestors were written by German anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s. Just because they came from an increasingly xenophobic society, does not mean that categorization should automatically apply to them and their work. The most biased historical perspectives, interestingly enough, seem to come from Indian scholarship - usually by claiming the authors of the Vedas knew everything there is to know about science and the natural world.
The reason I take the time to even write a response here is because propagating a biased view of history can harm people. A vast majority of Indians believe that Ayurvedic remedies are more effective than modern medicine, and many pay for engaging in this widespread anti-colonial perspective with their lives.
This is exactly my point - the "woke" perspective is that every scholar of that era is to be denounced as a white supremacists, and their work ignored, without any examination of the literature or citing of a single specific example.
I am not saying you're incorrect - for example, the German Anthropologie school (largely centered around the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute from 1927 onwards) was famous for its pseudo-scholarship on racial disparities. However, this is by no means a blanket statement on European scholarship - one notable exception that comes to mind is Max Müller [1], who was famously accused of being anti-Christian for his admiration of Eastern cultures, and was "deeply saddened by the fact that these classifications later came to be expressed in racist terms".
Likewise, there are several German authors whose books sit on my parent's bookshelf that provided objective anthropological history of India (e.g. on the Kuru kingdom and PGW civilization) without editorializing a white supremacist narrative onto it.
Also, the Nazi party only came to prominence in the 1930s, after they had sufficiently terrorized the population to go along with their racial policies, and forced academia to go along with their unscientific ideology - a notoriously similar trend is going on in America today.
Ever since Pizarro went searching, the legends of lost civilizations have been in the minds of explorers.
Lots of explorers came up empty and the legends were thought to be hokum by supposed experts, so yeah, I don’t understand the narrative.
Not only that but neither the Chinese nor South Africans, etc., have a different take or narrative that’s more globocebtric. I mean, I don’t think even the natives of the Amazon today have a better understanding than European, American, Asian or African archeologists regarding any such ancient civilization.
Am I reading the same article? I don’t understand what you’re referring to with ‘problematic’. I thought I was reading a puff piece about some scholars digging holes in the jungle hoping to get people excited so they can get more funding.
Silly little 800 word articles like this are easier to see them for what they are when printed on newspaper.
I read it differently. For context, I am not triggered by people pointing out that every culture has its own biases and myopias, and just like a fish in water, sometimes they are unaware. Honestly, this seems like one of few absolute truths in the world: perspective is always incomplete.
Here's how I read it:
The quotes are from two archaeologist/anthropologists who specialize in the Amazon and ancient Amazonian culture. They are extremely familiar with the general level of knowledge of their audience regarding their specialties.
> "This is older than any other site we know in the Amazon. We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation, but this shows we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation," says Prof Stephen Rostain, director of investigation at the National Centre for Scientific Research in France, who led the research.
> "It changes the way we see Amazonian cultures. Most people picture small groups, probably naked, living in huts and clearing land - this shows ancient people lived in complicated urban societies," says co-author Antoine Dorison.
The use of "we" is the polite way of saying "most people who will be reading this article".
It's not moralizing. It's pointing out that what most readers learned in school a few decades ago (and still believe) is incomplete, and we keep learning new extents of its incompleteness -- and the missing parts of the story make everything much more interesting.
They are excited by this and want to share. This paper is a pretty big deal, and they should be excited. I'd love to know as much about Amazonian civilizations, architectures, societies, etc as I do Aztec, Maya, and Inca.
I agree that this is not a Eurocentric issue, take Egyptology for example. They know there are secret chambers in the great pyramid, but the Egyptians have no desire to really look further. Western Egyptologists just follow suit. Nobody bothers to take seriously the strange, water like erosion around the Sphinx. Or that perfectly symmetrical urns and statues were carved out of granite. How does one carve the interior cavity of an urn with the most rudimentary of tools? The pyramids are not even the most interesting aspect but yet we all just shrug and say nothing to see here, Egyptians included.
As a layman, simple explanations for your points spring to mind.
1. An exhaustive understanding of the pyramids and secret chambers would be detrimental to the Egyptian mythos. Egypt owns the pyramids. Western Egyptologists need Egyptian cooperation to learn anything new.
2. Sand-filled wind behaves much like an abrasive liquid. There is more sand in the bottom of a sand-filled wind than in the top.
3. Rotation creates surprising perfection, especially when wielded by skilled artisans. It's rarely the tools that bring results.
> How does one carve the interior cavity of an urn with the most rudimentary of tools?
Abrasive grit. You can make a saw out of a plank with grit -- the grit will eat the plank faster than stone, but it can cut through granite because quartz in the sand is harder than granite. Similarly, you can make a drill with a dowel and grit. The step from drill to lathe is pretty obvious to me.
And don't forget time. People with primitive technology have an astounding amount of patience compared to soft-handed technologists. Speaking as a soft-handed technologist, of course.
> We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation, but this shows we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation
Why do we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation? They found a city with buildings and roads. That's an entirely traditional Eurocentric definition of civilization.
It doesn't make logical sense but this is currently a big meme in social sciences. If you follow anthropology you'll see many similar quotes so I'm not surprised it spilled over into archaeology as well by now.
The best part is when you look them up, it turns out the researcher who said this is European, from France.
> Prof Rostain says he was warned against this research at the start of his career because scientists believed no ancient groups had lived in the Amazon.
I dont' know what the hell he means with this Eurocentric view. We know a lot about ancient civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, we know about Göbekli Tepe that is from Neolithic period, we know also about many African and Asian civilizations.
We are also well aware about ancient settlements in America, especially in the Amazon area.
That a professor with an European name doesn't know much about this is his own personal problem but him peddling this false information and BBC going along with this creates a larger issue.
How can they just claim the city's been "found" when it's been known about for half a century? All they did (that's relevant to the article) is a recent LIDAR survey of a site they've been digging on for 25 years.
If lower Manhattan were discovered, would it also be characterized as being for "ceremonial purposes" that would have a "very powerful meaning", perhaps linked to a ceremony or belief.
2003 - Lost cities of the Amazon revealed: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/wbna3077413
2008 - Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lost-amazon-citie...
2019 - Long lost cities in the Amazon were once home to millions of people: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132130-300-long-los...
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