Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes is widely recognized as THE modern masterpiece of historical landscape geography. It is one of a trilogy of books inspired and coordinated by William Denevan. The others are Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America by William Doolittle and Cultivated Landscapes of Middle America on the Eve of Conquest by Thomas M. Whitmore and B.L. Turner II.
The authors of all three volumes are landscape geographers who have studied the profound and lasting impacts that indigenous human beings have had over thousands of years on the vegetation, soils, hydrology, and wildlife of the Americas. Denevan is the unofficial "godfather" of an intellectual tradition that developed under Carl O. Sauer in the Department of Geography at Berkeley.
Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes (and it's companion books) is the culmination of a lifetime of pathfinding research and teaching. It is a text, organized and written for graduate and undergraduate instruction, but between the lines it is also a tale of adventure and exploration. The insights related in Cultivated Landscapes were gained by the combined efforts of hundreds of field researchers braving tropical jungles, trackless swamps, towering mountain ranges, and seared deserts. The book is a synthesis, but it represents hands-on fieldwork in what we think of today as wilderness, but what in truth has been home to humanity for 10,000 years or more.
Amazonia and the Andes seem today to be harsh regions, difficult and testing for the bare survival of only the hardiest people. Yet the indigenous residents developed complex systems of cultivation, planting, orcharding, and plant and animal husbandry that were intensive, highly productive, and sustainable. Apparently marginal lands with extremes of climate and poor soils once supported large populations and complex societies.
Denevan approaches that complexity through the analysis of anthropogenic landforms. These include cross-channel terraces and check dams, sloping-field terraces, bench terraces, embankments, pond fields, sunken fields, bordered gardens, canals, reservoirs, raised and ridged fields, ditched fields, crop mounds, and many others. Hundreds of thousands of such ancient cultivated sites still exist, although they have been rediscovered only recently, most often through aerial observation and photography.
Europeans did not encounter an untrammeled wilderness but a landscape rich with human antiquity and ancient presence. The Americas were homelands to people for thousands of years prior to European expansion here. This is true everywhere in the Americas. Where you sit as you read this review, your location today, has history, a human history of incredible antiquity. That is an important revelation. This is not a "new world" but an ancient land filled with the ghosts of civilizations past. Our landscapes have seen the imprint of humanity for thousands of years. Wilderness is a myth. That is Bill Denevan's lesson for us all. This classic work belongs in every library.
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