Human Geography: Analysis of Ancient Amazon Farming Practices Report

This report analyzes a Science Daily article discussing how ancient Amazon farmers cultivated the rainforest. The study reveals that these communities utilized sustainable farming practices, such as enriching soil with Amazonian Dark Earths, to grow crops and edible trees. The report highlights the findings of archaeologists, paleoecologists, botanists, and ecologists, who have shown that these farmers maintained the forest ecosystem more efficiently than modern agriculture, which often leads to deforestation. The author examines the article's strengths, such as its informative content on soil richness and crop expansion, while also pointing out weaknesses, including grammatical errors, repetitive information, and abrupt conclusions. The report concludes that the article offers a new perspective on sustainable agriculture but could be improved with more detailed information and a clearer presentation of the findings, including the application of ancient methods to current environmental concerns.

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Summary:
The news published on July 23, 2018 in he renowned newspaper Science Daily has
analyzed the method applied by the ancient communities in the Amazon basin who left an
enduring legacy on the rainforest in this basin. The amazon rainforest was considered to be
untouched by the civilized world for a long time but this study has pointed out that the
research team has proved this notion of inaccessibility in this particular rainforest completely
wrong (Sciencedaily.com, 2018). These studies have detailed the profound effect of farmers
of this region to grow crops and edible trees by utilizing fire to enhance the nutrient content
of this rainforest soil. The portion of eastern Brazil has captured high concentration of such
rich soil produced by the farmers of that time.
In order to strengthen the suspicion, the researchers have examined the charcoal,
pollen along with the plants remains from this part of soil and reach the idea that the Amazon
farmers utilized this land intensively where they had expanded growth of various types of
crops. However, they did not continuously clear other new areas of this forest to expand
farming as soil nutrients used to be depleted after two or more years of use. Another
important factor that this article has pointed out is associated with the part where the
concentration of farming has been found. Early Amazon farmers used the nutrient rich soil
that the researchers refer as Amazonian Dark Earths (ADEs) mainly around the around
archaeological sites near the Amazon (Sciencedaily.com, 2018). These areas have a huge
concentration of different types of edible plants. To the experts, these farmers of Amazon
followed more sustainable way of farming that the recent farmers do (Tremblay et al., 2015).
These ancient communities maintained the forest ecosystem more efficiently that can
challenge the fruitlessness of modern style of agriculture which is causing more
deforestation.

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Review:
This article named “Ancient farmers transformed Amazon and left an enduring
legacy on the rainforest”, is a highly appraisable piece of study (Sciencedaily.com, 2018).
This has concentrated on discussing a very important factor of environmental study which is
associated with a biological hotspot located in the Amazon basin rainforest. The content of
this article is quite informative from where the readers get insight of how the ancient Amazon
farmers used to maintain the richness of soil and expanded their crop growing capacities.
This study is an amalgamation of the studies of the repeated archaeologists, paleo ecologists,
botanists as well as ecologists. Hence this there is no way to suspect the truthfulness of this
article. Through this, the readers can understand that before 4500 years, the Ancient farmers
flowed such a method of farming that this modern and developed methods of today’s
agriculture cannot imitate this type of sustainable way of farming. These ancient farmers
identified the nutrient rich lakes as well as river shores where they got rich soils to grow their
staple food like maize and other edible trees.
However, in understanding the study of this news article there are several issues that
can prevent proper understanding or misguide the readers (Coomes et al., 2016). First of all,
this news article is not lengthy and does not follow norms of proper formatting as the readers
may feel that the article has ended in an abrupt way. There is no specific breakage of
paragraph so that the readers can easily capture the reason or difference in the content of the
new paragraphs. Secondly, there are some grammatical issues like lengthy sentences where
there are abundant and irrelevant usage of articles in one sentence (Porro, Lopez-Feldman &
Vela-Alvarado, 2015). The grammatical errors regarding tense and clauses are also there in
this particular article. Many of the sentences seem to be incomplete in their nature. In the
aspect of content, the author of this article, has used some terms which the reader with no
idea of paleoecology may find difficult to understand (Meyer et al., 2017). The author has not

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referred to the names of the places where the rich soil could be found rather only referred to
the recent archeological sites in brazil. As the total area of Brazilian rainforest is actually
huge, hence no reader can get the idea of the exact position or region the author is talking
about. He also has not named the edible trees which he is repeated a number of times. In
addition to this, the article is more repetitive than informative. The author has captured more
or less similar terms and information from each of the researchers and repeated in all over the
article. The article concludes with the information that the ancient farmers used soil in a most
produced manner for farming but the modern agriculture prefers deforesting the area for
agriculture (O'Connor et al., 2018). The author did not identify how this method can be
applied in recent times also so that the contribution to the global warming can be reduced and
the recent technology can produce similar rich soils without harming the environment.
Conclusion:
Therefore, it can be concluded that this article published in Science Daily has
captured a completely new perspective of agriculture which the ancient amazon famers
utilized to grow more crops without harming nature or deforesting the rainforest for growing
their food. The author of this article has collected ample information to prove the uniqueness
of this study. He has taken information from all the related streams so that the study gains
more appealing nature and the readers get attracted to know about the further progress of this
study. Despite the fact that the author has taken various measures to establish this thoughts
and information gathered from different source, the content did not reach the height where
the readers get complete knowledge about the subject. This is due to the fact that there are
some grammatical and syntactical error present in the content and the content is somehow
repetitive. The author has presented same points differently number of times and concludes
this article abruptly without and information of further study.

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References:
Coomes, O. T., Lapointe, M., Templeton, M., & List, G. (2016). Amazon river flow regime
and flood recessional agriculture: Flood stage reversals and risk of annual crop
loss. Journal of Hydrology, 539, 214-222.
Meyer, K. M., Klein, A. M., Rodrigues, J. L., Nüsslein, K., Tringe, S. G., Mirza, B. S., ... &
Bohannan, B. J. (2017). Conversion of Amazon rainforest to agriculture alters
community traits of methane‐cycling organisms. Molecular ecology, 26(6), 1547-
1556.
O'Connor, J. C., Rebel, K. T., Ferreira Dos Santos, M. J., & Dekker, S. C. (2018). The
influence of groundwater and land cover change on evapotranspiration in the Amazon
Rainforest transition zone. In Geophysical Research Abstracts (Vol. 20).
Porro, R., Lopez-Feldman, A., & Vela-Alvarado, J. W. (2015). Forest use and agriculture in
Ucayali, Peru: Livelihood strategies, poverty and wealth in an Amazon
frontier. Forest Policy and Economics, 51, 47-56.
Sciencedaily.com. (2018). Ancient farmers transformed Amazon and left an enduring legacy
on the rainforest. Retrieved from
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180723142845.htm
Tremblay, S., Lucotte, M., Revéret, J. P., Davidson, R., Mertens, F., Passos, C. J. S., &
Romana, C. A. (2015). Agroforestry systems as a profitable alternative to slash and
burn practices in small-scale agriculture of the Brazilian Amazon. Agroforestry
Systems, 89(2), 193-204.