Until quite recently, Amazonia was regarded as a timeless refuge of solitary tribes, about as close to Rousseau or Hobbes’s State of Nature as one could possibly get. As we’ve seen, such romantic notions persisted in anthropology well into the 1980s, through studies that cast groups like the Yanomami in the role of ‘contemporary ancestors’, windows on to our evolutionary past. Research in the fields of archaeology and ethnohistory is now overturning this picture.
