Heckenberger is quick to point out that the Amazon is not a uniform landscape. Perhaps both options need not be mutually exclusive. Should the goal be to preserve a “pristine” wilderness untouched by human activity? Or a working landscape that supports indigenous peoples?
Its history brings up the question of how to go about conserving the remaining Amazon. The Upper Xingu is the largest contiguous tract of Amazonian forest still under indigenous management. With indigenous Amazonians’ numbers decimated, and little concrete evidence of their earlier civilizations, researchers visiting the Amazon generally concluded that its people had always been small, “primitive” tribes who left little imprint on their environment. By the 1950s, there were as few as 500 Xinguanos. Heckenberger and his colleagues tentatively estimate that the population of the region numbered in the tens of thousands, but crashed due to enslavement and disease epidemics. But, according to the Kuikuro’s oral history, the first Europeans they encountered were slavers, around 1750. The first written record that refers to the Kuikuro, a subgroup of the Xinguanos with whom Heckenberger has worked for a decade, is from 1884. A key reason for the controversy has been the lack of good physical evidence, according to Heckenberger. In recent years, archaeologists have been revising their view of the Amazon, sometimes provoking bitter debates over how extensively the land could have been settled by humans.