Andean Past

Volume 11 Article 6

12-15-2013

Betty Meggers: Her Later YearsWilliam I. Woodsdeceased

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Recommended CitationWoods, William I. (2013) "Betty Meggers: Her Later Years," Andean Past: Vol. 11 , Article 6.Available at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/andean_past/vol11/iss1/6

BETTY MEGGERS: HER LATER YEARS

WILLIAM I. WOODS

University of Kansas

Eduardo Goés Neves and Betty Meggers. Photo by William I. Woods.

In this volume of Andean Past MonicaBarnes provides a brief account of BettyMeggers’ life, while Robert L. Carneiro gives usa personal view of his contributions to Amazo-nian ethnography and archaeology in relation toBetty’s stance in these areas. Both of them, asshould be, have given us clear and respectfulviews of her long career. I pick up where Bobleft off, and summarize my own experiences withBetty. This retrospective discussion is largelybased on our face-to-face conversations andthose that occurred first by letter, and then by

email. It is liberally filled with recollections andquotations. I ask readers to please excuse theperhaps excessive use of the first person. With-out it I would give a stilted impression largelynot true to the focus of the discussion.

I first encountered Betty and Bob, which isto say I was first told about, and read, contribu-tions by them, in 1969 in a Method and Theoryin Anthropology course at the University ofWisconsin-Milwaukee. I was entranced by theirquite divergent conceptions of Amazonian

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occupation. A short time later, a year after thefirst Earth Day organized by Wisconsin SenatorGaylord Nelson, Betty’s classic volume Ama-zonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise(Meggers 1971) appeared to great critical ac-claim within the environmental activist commu-nity, with only an occasional critical appraisal. Iwas a graduate student studying with a group ofLatin American scholars based in the Geogra-phy and Anthropology departments who hadfirst-hand experience with many situationssimilar to those Betty described. Consequently,her volume was discussed openly in our semi-nars. The works of William Denevan from thenearby University of Wisconsin-Madison werewell known and also influenced all of us withinterests in pre-Columbian Latin America.

In 1974 I was fortunate to be a part of aUnited States National Science Foundation project under the direction of Robert Eidt thatinvestigated anthropogenic soil alteration athistoric mission sites in Misiones Province,Argentina and Chibcha ridged fields in theSabana de Bogotá, Colombia. In addition toreinforcing my feelings about the importance ofpositive human impacts on the environment, Iwas able to transverse Amazonia, look down onits vastness, and experience some of its distinc-tive soils during a stopover in Manaus. Thefollowing year, I worked in Mexico’s PueblaValley on another N.S.F. project under thedirection of Melvin Fowler. There I gainedmany additional insights into the sophisticationof human articulations with, and manipulationsof, the environment, efforts aimed at making itmore productive. Although some of these failedafter centuries of use, the basic fact implanted inme from these experiences was that humans inthe past had tried to improve the physicalconditions in which they settled, considered themicro-environment and their larger socialcontext, and had a long-term perspective onmanagement.

During the following years, my efforts wereconcentrated on finally getting my Ph.D. and onMississippian archaeology in the MidwesternUnited States, on a Lucanian and Roman site insouthern Italy, on a project in western Belize,and on continuing field studies in the PueblaValley, with little more consideration of thebasic questions presented by Amazonia. This allchanged in 1993 during a visit to the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison to present an invitedlecture on anthrosol analysis. A friend of minereported to me that Bill Denevan was having ameeting of faculty and graduate students possi-bly interested in a project whose purpose was tolocate and investigate the physical, chemical,and archaeological properties of terra preta.These organic and nutrient-rich anomalous soilsare found throughout Amazonia in a variety ofenvironmental situations and are very relevantto any discussion of pre-Columbian populations, soil fertility, consequent agricultural productiv-ity and the resulting permanent settlements.After that meeting I was hooked, because thisprovided a venue for research in my specialty ofarchaeological soil science and presented anarray of topics that looked to be fun and chal-lenging. Later that year, and the next, I traveledto Brazil and met counterparts who had beeninvestigating terra preta. My background intheory and methodologies, and my relevantexperience, provided a context for my associa-tion with, and appreciation of, Betty.

By 1995 I felt it was appropriate to share myviewpoint on what I had learned, and so Ipresented a paper at the Applied GeographyConference in Arlington, Virginia, on Novem-ber tenth. Before attending the meeting I hadwritten a letter introducing myself to Betty andrequested to meet with her at the Smithsonian(letter from William I. Woods to Betty J.Meggers, October 20, 1995, in the possession ofWoods). She immediately replied in the affirma-tive and gave me directions for accessing heroffice. Apparently, she was always there, be-

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cause she did not specify any time or date, justextended a warm invitation to talk. When I wasfree from the conference the day after mypresentation I took the Metro to D.C. and madeit to Betty’s office. She was most gracious, and,to my pleasure, regaled me with her vision of thepre-Columbian situation in Amazonia, thearchaeologists involved, and their techniques inthe quest to understand that region. Of course,I was shown how terra preta had formed bymultiple, seasonal reoccupations of a site asdemonstrated by ceramic seriation. She pro-duced detailed distribution maps that correlatedwith her hypothesis. There were many personalaccounts of her work with “my dear departedhusband”. Curiously an 1867 letter on black-lined mourning stationery from Mary ToddLincoln to my great grandfather, in the posses-sion of my family, uses the same wording. Bettydiscussed the many personages that had oncebeen, or were at the time, still actively involvedin Amazonian research. Most of these I haveforgotten, but Anna Roosevelt stood out as aperson to be avoided, as she was quite mis-guided. Indeed, Betty said that she had nevereven met Anna. This is one of the many pointsdisputed between the two. I choose to listen,and not disagree, because anything else wouldclearly have been an inappropriate and unpro-ductive stance. Toward the end of the after-noon, Betty began to reveal her misgivingsabout the current crop of Amazonianist archae-ologists apart from Roosevelt and said that thosein the biological and physical sciences reallyunderstood the value of her observations. Sheshortly followed up with a letter (Meggers toWoods, May 15, 1996, in the possession ofWoods) instructing me to get in touch withMichael Eden, Denis Williams, and, especially,Eurico Miller, whose assistant would show mesites in the upper Madeira. This was a kindgesture, but at the time I was unable to take upher suggestions.

Because she thought I was a geographer, and later a geologist, but surprisingly never anarchaeologist, I was included in the natural andphysical science group and for a while wastreated most favorably. Upon leaving her officeI was given a host of reprints with instructionsto read and follow their line of reasoning. Iforwarded these to Bill Denevan and in responseto one he replied, in part, “I had not seen thenew Meggers’ article. She dismisses Carvajal asbeing full of ‘fantasy,’ but she only cites the firstversion of Carvajal. The second, written withmore care with the first version in front of him,does not have enormous numbers of Indians andexcessive lengths of villages” (William Denevanto Woods, March 27, 1997, in the possession ofWoods). Shortly afterwards Betty sent a letter(Meggers to Woods, February 25, 1997, in thepossession of Woods) saying that she was sur-prisingly not familiar with the Nimuendaju map(Nimuendajú 1952 [1939]), that I had sent herand requested a source for it.

Because I was new to the topic of Amazo-nian environments, I endeavored to immersemyself in the literature and meet, when possible,the principals who were producing it, and tovisit the field situations in which they wereworking. Dirse Kern, Marcondes Lima da Costa,Mike Heckenberger, Jim Peterson, and EduardoGoés Neves were particularly crucial to myeducation in this regard. I received permitsfrom the Brazilian and U.S. governments toimport soils and did so at every opportunity.Analysis of their physical and chemical proper-ties indicated a clear separation between terrapreta and the background latosols, with traitsindicating an anthropogenic origin dominatingthe former.

Later (letter from Meggers to Woods, May17, 1998, in the possession of Woods) Bettyrequested my permission to publish portions ofa paper that Joe McCann and I had given at the1998 Association of American Geographers

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meeting with the note, “I want to use it to refutethe notion among archaeologists that this soil isintentionally produced by humans and thereforeimplies high precolumbian population density inAmazonia.” However, the focus of the paperand subsequent publication (Woods andMcCann 1999) was just the reverse. I sent themanuscript to her and received a lengthy letterthat provided a detailed analysis of this docu-ment with strong suggestions for revision. A fewexcerpts will provide the tone of the letter(Meggers to Woods, June 9, 1998, in the posses-sion of Woods). “With regard to the Kayapó, Idon’t recall any mention of terra preta beingproduced by their manipulations.” This is inspite of the fact that she was most familiar withRobert Carneiro’s and Michael Heckenberger’s intensive work with the Kuikuru and that ofSusanna Hecht and Darrell Posey with theKayapó (Carneiro 1957; Hecht and Posey 1989;Heckenberger 1996). “Although you allude tothe distinction between terra preta and terramulata, it may be worth noting that terra preta,which is the most desirable for agriculture atpresent, is unlikely to have been cultivatedindigenously because habitation sites are alsoburial grounds.” A wealth of evidence availableat that time clearly suggests this not to havebeen the case in many portions of Amazonia,although a conversation with Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff in Belém shortly before he diedsuggested that, at least in Colombia, peopleconsciously avoided terra preta sites with theexception of gathering feral plant hybrids. Shewrote, “Finally, I think you are being unfair byclaiming that those of us who consider shiftingcultivation environmentally friendly ‘concede’ itis incompatible with dense sedentary popula-tions and have suggested a rewording.” Thereare many handwritten notations on the docu-ment and in the letter and many other relevantquotes, but these will suffice to provide itsessence. By this time there was an exponentialincrease in archaeological activities and atten-dant terra preta research in Amazonia and the

results were strikingly different from Betty’sversion. The citations are too numerous to cite,but four volumes (Lehmann et al. 2003; Glaserand Woods 2004; Woods et al. 2009; Teixeira etal. 2010) on the Amazonian dark earths result-ing from many conferences and workshops givea clue to this activity. Additionally, there weredocumentaries for the BBC, PBS, and otheroutlets in Europe, Brazil, and Japan, as well asnumerous articles in scientific and popularoutlets relating to the recent advances in Ama-zonian archaeology and their implications. Thisprovides the context for future correspondencebetween us about which I will be brief.

In September 2001the Society for BrazilianArchaeology (SAB) met in Rio de Janeiro andEduardo Neves had organized a symposiumwhose purpose was to provide an update onrecent developments in Amazonian archaeol-ogy. Most of the presenters, and Betty, sat in thefirst row, as always. She shook her headthroughout each paper and at the end I intro-duced her to Eduardo (arguably the premiercurrent Amazonian archaeologist), steppedback, and took the photo at the beginning ofthis tribute. One can see Betty telling Eduardoof the errors in his interpretations and his defen-sive posture. By this time, Betty was clearly onthe wane with her environmental deterministprospective and she knew it. However, shecontinued to fight to the last. Her review inChungara (Meggers 2011) of the 2008 Handbookof South American Archaeology was scathing. Itrepeatedly refers to “foreign” investigators,meaning those from the mid-latitudes who werenot from the country in which they were work-ing. The irony of this is that Betty never consid-ered herself as belonging to this group. To hercredit, throughout her career she encouragedand supported Latin American researchers morethan anyone else I have known. However, onlythose who agreed with her were granted theprivilege of support. On the other hand, she wasalways available and provided data to anyone

19 - Woods: Betty J. Meggers

who was interested. She was not a scholarsquirrel by any means.

My last correspondence with Betty includedtwo emails on 16 July 2009 and one on 10November 2010. The following excerpts showthe tenure of the conversations. In relation tothe 2009 Woods et al. volume she stated: “I wasnot happy with your statements on the previouspage, in which you claim that I have ‘failed torealize the significance [of terra pretas] forprehistoric cultivation’ and attribute theirexistence to recurrent short-term occupations,and assert that this view is ‘in need of seriousreconsideration.’” “I have been disappointed inyour support of the current fad to interpret terrapreta as an intentional creation and the basis ofintensive agriculture.” “Please give me refer-ences to the evidence you claim exists for largesedentary populations and intentional creationof terra preta.” In her final message she chidedme about my speaking activities: “The grapevinetells me that you were the keynote speaker atthe recent 29th Northeast Conference on An-dean Archaeology and Ethnohistory and al-though none of the presentations dealt withAmazonia, you spoke on Amazonian DarkEarths.” “I was surprised by your support ofinterpretations by the foreign archaeologistsbecause when we exchanged correspondence inthe early 70’s you were less convinced that terrapreta identified dense permanent settlements.”(As mentioned above our correspondenceactually began in the mid-1990s.)

Please do not in the least take my commentsto be derogatory, Betty, indeed, was clearly agiant–a most prolific scholar whose positiveinfluences spanned well over half a century.Unfortunately, the basis for her stance on somany Amazonian and extra-Amazonian (e.g.Valdivia) issues was not a solid one. But shestuck to these until the end. Betty and herhusband, Clifford Evans, were both students ofJulian Steward, and as such were trapped in a

mindset that was vogue in the 1940s, but clearlywas shown to be a false one. Robert Carneiroput the nail in it by the early 1960s and wasfollowed by Donald Lathrap and his students, aswell as by many, many others. However, Bettypersevered and she, through her adherents, stillexerts an enormous influence. Betty, from thegrave, remains among us. This is not totally abad thing. She always made one think and willcontinue to do so. I will miss her emails. Perhapsshe will continue sending them.

REFERENCES CITED

Carneiro, Robert L.1957 Subsistence and Social Structure: An Ecological

Study of the Kuikuru Indians. Ph.D. dissertation,University of Michigan.

Glaser, Bruno and William I. Woods, editors 2004 Amazonian Dark Earths: Explorations in Space and

Time. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.Hecht, Susanna B. And Darrell A. Posey1989 Preliminary Results on Kayapó Soil Management

Techniques. Advances in Economic Botany 7:174-188.

Heckenberger, Michael J.1996 War and Peace in the Shadow of Empire Building:

Sociopolitical Change in the Upper Xingu of South-eastern Amazonia, A.D. 1400-2000. Ph.D. disser-tation, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania.

Lehmann, Johannes, Dirse C. Kern, Bruno Glaser, andWilliam I. Woods, editors 2003 Amazonian Dark Earths: Origin, Properties and

Management. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Meggers, Betty J.1971 Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit

Paradise. Chicago: Aldine, Atherton.2011 Review of Handbook of South American Archaeol-

ogy edited by Helaine Silverman and William H.Isbell. Chungará: Revista de Antropología Chilena43(1):147-157.

Nimuendajú, Curt 1952 [1939] The Tapajó. Kroeber Anthropological

Society Papers 6:1-15.Teixeira, Wenceslau G., Dirse C. Kern, Beáta E. Madari,Hedinaldo N. Lima, and William I. Woods, editors 2010 As terras pretas de índio da Amazônia: Sua

caracterização e uso deste vonhecimento na vriaçãode novas áreas. Manaus, Brazil: Embrapa Ama-zônia Ocidental.

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Woods, William I. and Joseph M. McCann 1999 The Anthropogenic Origin and Persistence of

Amazonian Dark Earths. Yearbook, Conference ofLatin Americanist Geographers 25:7-14.

Woods, William I., Wenceslau G. Teixeira, JohannesLehmann, Christoph Steiner, Antoinette WinklerPrins,and Lilian Rebellato, editors 2009 Amazonian Dark Earths: Wim Sombroek’s Vision.

Berlin: Springer.

Betty Meggers towards the end of her life. Photo courtesy of Barbara Watanabe, Smithsonian Institution.