Earthmovers of the Amazon

摘要

Trinidad, bouvia—In some ways, William Denevan says today, he didn't know what he was getting into when he decided to write his Ph.D. thesis about the Beni, a remote, nearly uninhabited, and almost roadless department in the Bolivian Amazon. Located between the Andes Mountains and the river Guapore (a major Amazon tributary), the Beni spends half the year parched in near-desert conditions and the other half flooded by rain and snowmelt. But it wasn't until he made his first research trip there, in 1961, that Denevan realized the area was filled with earthworks that oil company geologists—the only scientists in the are—believed to be ruins of an unknown civilization.