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The results took the team by surprise. In the river-bluff cores, they found bits of charcoal, phytoliths of burned grasses, and phytoliths of herbaceous plants often found in disturbed areas―but no phytoliths of common Amazon crops. This suggested that humans had cleared and disturbed some parts of the forest there, but there was little evidence of farming. And in the inland cores, the team detected relatively few traces of charcoal and little to no sign of burned phytoliths, disturbance-related phytoliths, or crop phytoliths. "If humans were in those areas, they didn't stay very long, and they didn't farm," says Piperno.Moreover, this picture of small groups of hunters and gatherers in the western Amazon seems to fit with some data concerning ancient agriculture in the region. Before the arrival of Europeans, Amazonia's inhabitants had only stone axes at their disposal, and clearing large rainforest tracts with such tools would have been enormously time-consuming. A study conducted in the 1970s, for example, showed that a worker equipped with a stone ax needed 115 hours to cut down just one tree. So it is possible that slash-and-burn agriculture arose in the western Amazon only after Europeans arrived with metal tools.The team's findings are bound to stir controversy and debate, however. Anna Roosevelt, an archaeologist at the University of Illinois, Chicago, thinks the team failed to gather sufficient data to reach any conclusions. She says that the 120-centimeter-long soil cores that team members took with a handheld auger may not have been sufficient to find deeply buried evidence of ancient human agriculture. "You really need to study the geomorphology of each sampling site," says Roosevelt, "because in Amazonia there's a lot of erosion and redeposition [of sediments by water], and you need to find out exactly where the human occupation surfaces are."But Deborah Pearsall, an archaeologist at the University of Missouri in Columbia, sees little to criticize in the study, calling it "really solid." The findings, she notes, make a lot of sense: the study areas in the western Amazon receive as much as 3500 mm of rain a year, far more than eastern regions where ancient farmers clearly tended a variety of crops. "So maybe early agriculturalists are not favoring this [wetter western region] because there are higher pest loads there and more highly leached soils."Michael Heckenberger, an archaeologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, adds that the study serves as a badly needed reality check to much of the blue-skying of the past, when researchers developed sweeping models for the entire Amazon region, an area roughly the size of the continental United States. "We've really just scratched the surface in this region [archaeologically]", Heckenberger concludes, "and I think we need to be very cautious in creating highly generalized models of what such a vast areas would have been like."
