ABSTRACT
More than four centuries have passed since the Dominican pater Gaspar de Carvajal described grandiose and splendid, densely populated Indian garden cities and settlements in the Amazon basin. Now, four centuries later, findings of straight broad street residues and settlement places (Heckenberger et al. 2003, 2008), and in particular the patches of fertile Amazonian dark earths (ADE) or terra preta (Sombroek 1966; Glaser et al. 2004; Kern et al. 2004; Neves et al. 2003), finally reveal a true core in the Orellana’s 450-year-old ‘legend’. Thus, the Amazon basin was, up to 450 years before today, likely not the native, untouched green wilderness with just a few ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer cultures that our textbooks taught us. In the 1960s, the famous Netherlands soil scientist Wim Sombroek published his stimulating book on soils in the Amazon basin, their properties, geology, genesis and associated vegetation (Sombroek 1966). He described the unusually fertile terra preta patches and islands that existed in an ocean of infertile, highly weathered soils (mostly Ferralsols, according to World Reference Base) within the Amazon basin (Sombroek 1966). For a long time, it was hotly debated whether ADE soils were of anthropogenic origin or the result of volcanic deposits, nutrient-rich sediments from the rivers of the Andes etc. (Glaser et al. 2004).
