Early settlement patterns

The Amazon basin has long been relatively uninhabited. At the time of the European conquest, the bottomlands and fringing upland surfaces of the Amazon River and its major tributaries supported relatively dense, sedentary populations of indigenous peoples who practiced intensive root-crop farming, supplemented by fishing and by hunting aquatic mammals and reptiles. The more-elevated areas away from the rivers and their floodplains were—and still are in some of the more remote sectors—inhabited by small, widely dispersed, seminomadic tribes of Indians. These groups traditionally have relied predominantly on hunting large and small animals and on gathering wild fruits, berries, and nuts while practicing small-patch agriculture of low yield. In the early 1990s the Indian population of the Amazon basin numbered about 600,000, of whom perhaps close to one-third lived in Brazil and the rest in the Oriente regions of the four Andean countries. However, by the early 21st century the Indian population had dropped to fewer than 200,000, partly as a result of deforestation and commercial exploitation on their lands.

The Amazonian Indians early devised means of making the poisonous bitter cassava (manioc) edible; the end product, called farinha, became a food staple widely used today in much of tropical America. Amazonian Indians perfected the use of quinine as a specific against malaria, extracted cocaine from the leaves of the coca tree, and collected the sap of the Brazilian rubber tree. They were skilled navigators in their dugout canoes and sailing rafts (jagandas), and they invented the blowgun and the hammock. One of their arrow poisons, curare, has been used to treat a host of paralyses and spastic disorders, including multiple sclerosis.

The early European explorers of the Amazon provisioned themselves from the food supplies of the Indians they met and commandeered their canoes. Large numbers of Indians were taken into slavery, especially during organized raids (bandeiras) from the 16th to the 18th century; many others succumbed to such European diseases as influenza, measles, and smallpox. The result was a complete breakdown of native life and a precipitous decrease in the Indian population; survivors fled into increasingly inaccessible sections of the Amazon basin. As late as 1906 there were reports of the wholesale capture of Indians who were enslaved in order to tap rubber, which was plentiful and commanded a high price on the world market but which was difficult to exploit because rubber trees were sparsely scattered over a huge area.

Settlement by Europeans and mestizos (those of mixed Indian and European ancestry) did not occur to any appreciable degree until the 1870s and ’80s, when victims of severe droughts in northeastern Brazil began to move into Amazonia to profit from the rubber boom. Another wave of immigration began at the end of World War II, spurred by the rapid economic development of the region.

Most of the surviving Indian peoples live in the remote areas of the basin. Those living north of the Amazon River speak languages of the Arawaks and Caribs, while those to the south speak predominantly Tupian languages. Tupian was used as a lingua franca between Europeans and Indians until the Portuguese became dominant in the 19th century; nonetheless, Brazilian Portuguese has been heavily influenced by Tupian. Finally, there are known to be “undiscovered” Indian groups living in the Amazon region—i.e., those located so remotely that they have yet to be encountered or who have intentionally been left alone by outsiders.

Contemporary settlement patterns

The increasingly effective control of malaria, improved diets and sanitation, and the greater ease of transportation had made the Amazon basin more attractive for human settlement by the late 20th century. Increased activities related to resource exploitation have contributed to the transformation of the Amazon and its vast hinterland, especially in Brazil. Indeed, its vast area notwithstanding, the Amazon basin in the early 21st century had a predominantly urban population. Almost one-third of the estimated nine million Brazilians living in the 1.9 million-square-mile (5.2 million-square-km) area officially designated as Legal Amazonia are concentrated in Belém and Manaus, cities with more than one million inhabitants each, and in Santarém. These cities, which are logistic bases of operations for cattle ranching, mining, timber, and agroforestry projects, are still growing rapidly, with modern residential towers and shantytowns standing side by side. Even frontier trading centres in the interior, such as Marabá, Pôrto Velho, and Rio Branco, have significant populations. Some places in the upper reaches of the drainage area have become significant urban centres with most of the amenities of modern life—such as Florencia and Leticia in Colombia; Iquitos, Pucallpa, Tarapoto, and Puerto Maldonado in Peru; and Santa Cruz in Bolivia. These cities and towns, and even the more isolated settlements and mission stations of the Oriente, are all accessible by plane.

 

Since World War II the economic development of the Amazon basin has been a priority for the countries it spans. From the mid-1940s onward a number of “penetration roads” have been built from the populous highlands of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia into the Oriente. These roads have funneled untold numbers of landless peasants into the lowlands. They also have served to facilitate development of major oil discoveries and timber resources. Tropical hardwoods, river fish, and, since the 1980s, clandestinely produced cocaine have been objects of commercial exploitation, along with Brahman-type livestock raised on pastures newly carved from the selva. Such activities have led to widespread displacement of indigenous groups, who have been either forced onto new reserves or left to survive as best they could.

The opening of the Amazon basin has been pursued most aggressively in Brazil. In the mid-1950s the decision was made to refocus the country toward its interior by constructing a new inland capital, Brasília. One consequence of this decision was the initiation of a massive road-building program that aimed at integrating the North (consisting of the present-day states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Pará, Rondônia, and Roraima) with the rest of Brazil while establishing an escape valve for the crowded and drought-stricken Northeast. A 1,100-mile- (1,770-km-) long highway linking Brasília with Belém, the trade centre at the mouth of the Amazon, was completed in 1964. The even more ambitious 3,400-mile (5,100-km) all-weather Transamazonian Highway from the Atlantic port of Recife to Cruzeiro do Sul on the Peruvian border—with extensions north to Santarém and Manaus (later to the Venezuelan border) and southward to Cuiabá (Mato Grosso) and Pôrto Velho (Rondônia)—was to provide the frame for a network of nearly 20,000 miles (32,000 km) of highways and feeder routes that was to supersede the traditional fluvial transport system. By the early 21st century the highway had not been completed, and it remained largely unpaved and impassable at several points.