History of South America

• 1. Introduction

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  The history of South America begins with a civilization that stood while the Egyptian pyramids were being built. On the north-western coast of present-day Peru, the Norte Chico civilization took shape around 3500 BC. It was one of the first six civilizations to develop independently anywhere in the world. It predated the Mesoamerican Olmec by nearly two millennia. And it carried a strange distinction. It may have been the only civilization that leaned on fishing rather than farming to feed its people. This is a continent that spent roughly 30 million years as a biologically rich island, cut off from the rest of the planet. It is a place where some five million people may have lived in the Amazon in 1500. By the early 1980s that number had fallen below 200,000. How did high civilizations rise in the Andes and the rainforest? What happened when European ships appeared off these coasts in the late 1400s? And how did a continent of indigenous nations, African captives, and European colonizers reshape itself into the republics that follow a so-called pink tide today?

• 2. An Island Continent

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  Around 110 million years ago, South America and Africa began to pull apart along the southern Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The two had once been joined in a landmass called Gondwana, part of the supercontinent Pangaea. By about 35 million years ago, during the late Eocene, Antarctica and South America separated, and South America became a massive island-continent. For roughly 30 million years its biodiversity evolved in isolation from the rest of the world. The mass extinction that ended the dinosaurs 66 million years ago opened the way for neotropical rainforests like the Amazon. Over about 6 million years of recovery, widely spaced gymnosperm forests gave way to thick canopies, flowering plants, and high vertical layering. That isolation ended around 3 million years ago. The Panamanian land bridge formed and the Bolivar Trough marine barrier disappeared, joining South America to North America. The result was the Great American Interchange, a mass migration of plants and animals across the new bridge. The first species known to head north was Pliometanastes, a ground sloth roughly the size of a modern black bear. Around 1.9 million years ago, in the Irvingtonian stage, more followed the route north: the giant armadillo Pampatherium, the ground sloth Megatherium, the giant anteater Myrmecophaga, and the terror bird Titanis, the only large carnivore South America sent the other way. The exchange ran heavily in one direction. About 60 percent of present-day South American mammals descend from North American species.

• 3. The First Peoples

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  Monte Verde II in Chile offers some of the oldest evidence of humans in South America, dated to around 14,500 years ago. The Americas were first settled by people from eastern Asia who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into present-day Alaska. Three waves of migrants spread across the Americas over millennia, though genetic and linguistic evidence shows the last wave settled the northern tier and never reached the south. From around 13,000 years ago the Fishtail projectile point spread across the continent. Its disappearance around 11,000 years ago lined up with the loss of South America's megafauna in the Quaternary extinction event. Farming arrived next. The first evidence of agriculture dates to about 6500 BC, when potatoes, chilies, and beans were cultivated in the Amazon Basin. Pottery suggests manioc, still a staple today, was grown as early as 2000 BC. In the Andean highlands, llamas and alpacas were domesticated around 3500 BC for transport, meat, and fur, with guinea pigs raised for food. By 2000 BC agrarian villages had spread across the Andes, with crops like quinoa, corn, lima beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes, oca, and squashes, and cotton as the only major fiber crop. The Huaca Prieta site on the coast of Peru, dated to 4700 BC, ranks among the earliest permanent settlements, alongside the Valdivia culture in Ecuador at 3500 BC. The Cañari of Ecuador, the Quechua of Peru, and the Aymara of Bolivia became the three most important peoples to build settled agricultural societies on the continent.

• 4. The Salt People And El Dorado

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  The Cañari held the land of today's Ecuadorian provinces of Cañar and Azuay, with a city called Guapondelig that the Spanish believed was the site of El Dorado. They repulsed the Incan invasion with fierce resistance for years until they fell to Tupac Yupanqui, who is said to have married the Cañari princess Paccha to conquer them. Their old city was rebuilt twice, first as the Incan Tomipamba and later as the colonial city of Cuenca. Further north, the Muisca formed one of the four grand civilizations in the Americas. They inhabited the Altiplano Cundiboyacense, the high plateau in the Eastern Ranges of the Colombian Andes, with a population estimated between 300,000 and two million across roughly 25,000 square kilometres. They were called The Salt People for their extraction and trade of halite from brines, a process worked exclusively by Muisca women. The Muisca were the only pre-Columbian civilization in South America known to have used coins, called tejuelos. Their gold and tumbaga, a gold-silver-copper alloy, created the legend of El Dorado, the land, city, or man of gold. The famous Muisca raft in the Museo del Oro in Bogotá shows their skill at goldworking. The legend drew the Spanish inland. Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada and his brother Hernán Pérez led one of the most punishing of the Spanish conquests into the Andes in April 1536. Over a year, 80 percent of the soldiers died from the harsh climate, caimans, jaguars, and indigenous attacks. Tisquesusa, the zipa of Bacatá, was beaten on the 20th of April 1537, and died bathing in his own blood, as the mohan Popón had prophesied.

• 5. Rethinking The Amazon

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  Betty J. Meggers argued that Amazon forests held only small numbers of hunter-gatherer tribes, a view she set out in her book Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise. Recent archaeology has overturned that picture. From the 1970s, numerous geoglyphs emerged on deforested land dating between 0 and 1250 AD, pointing to dense populations and complex Pre-Columbian civilizations. A BBC series, Unnatural Histories, argued the rainforest was shaped by human hands for at least 11,000 years through practices like forest gardening. The first European to travel the length of the Amazon River was Francisco de Orellana in 1542. Long dismissed as an exaggerator, Orellana may have told the truth. The same documentary presents evidence that an advanced civilization was flourishing along the Amazon in the 1540s, later devastated by smallpox and other diseases the natives had no immunity to. Researchers have traced the fertile dark soil called terra preta across large areas of the forest, now widely accepted as a product of indigenous soil management. That engineered earth let agriculture and silviculture take hold in a once-hostile environment, which means large parts of the rainforest are likely the result of centuries of human management. In 2003, Michael Heckenberger and colleagues from the University of Florida found remains of large mid-forest settlements in the region of the Xinguanos, complete with roads, bridges, and large plazas. The discovery of the Upano Valley sites in eastern Ecuador predates all other known complex Amazonian societies.

• 6. The Andean Powers

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  The Chavín built a trade network and developed agriculture by 900 BC, with artifacts found at Chavín de Huantar in modern Peru at an elevation of 3,177 meters. This preliterate civilization spanned 900 to 200 BC. Centuries later, the Moche thrived on the north coast of Peru between the first and ninth century AD. Much of what is known about them comes from elaborate burials excavated by former UCLA professor Christopher B. Donnan with the National Geographic Society, and from ceramic pottery carved with scenes of daily life. The Moche were technologically advanced and traded with faraway peoples like the Maya. They practiced human sacrifice and blood-drinking rituals. The greatest of the Andean powers came last. The Inca held their capital at the puma-shaped city of Cuzco and dominated the Andes from 1438 to 1533. They called their realm Tawantin suyu, the land of the four regions, in Quechua. Inca rule reached nearly a hundred linguistic or ethnic communities, some 9 to 14 million people, linked by a 25,000-kilometre road system. They built cities with precise stonework across mountain terrain, practiced terrace farming, and left evidence of fine metalwork and successful skull surgery. The Inca had no written language but recorded information with quipu, a system of knotted strings. Francisco Pizarro led the Spanish Conquest that brought down the empire through disease and internal strife.

• 7. Treaties, Disease, And Revolt

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  Between 1452 and 1493, a series of papal bulls, Dum Diversas, Romanus Pontifex, and Inter caetera, cleared the way for European colonization and Catholic missions in the New World. In 1494, Portugal and Spain signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, dividing the non-European world between them along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Because longitude could not be measured accurately, the line was never strictly enforced, which let Portuguese Brazil expand across the meridian. In 1498, on his third voyage, Christopher Columbus reached the Gulf of Paria in what is now Venezuela. Amazed by the great current of freshwater there, he wrote to Isabella I and Ferdinand II that he must have reached terrestrial paradise. From 1499, conquistadors from Spain and later Portugal exploited the people and resources of the continent. The collapse that followed was staggering. European diseases such as smallpox, influenza, measles, and typhus were the overwhelming cause of depopulation, with estimates of decline ranging from 20 to 50 percent at the low end to 90 percent at the high end. Forced labor systems like the encomienda and the mining mita deepened the loss, and enslaved Africans with immunity to these diseases were brought in to replace the dead. Resistance took many forms. The Maroons, enslaved people who escaped into the forest, organized free communities that the royal army could not subdue. In a royal decree of 1713, the king legalized the first free population of the continent, Palenque de San Basilio in Colombia, led by Benkos Bioho. In Brazil, the Quilombo of Palmares became a genuine African kingdom. In 1780, the curaca Joseph Gabriel Condorcanqui, known as Tupac Amaru II, rose against the Viceroyalty of Peru, a revolt continued by Tupac Katari in Upper Peru.

• 8. From Independence To The Pink Tide

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  Simón Bolívar tried to keep the Spanish-speaking continent politically unified, but the new nations rapidly broke apart. The Spanish colonies won independence in the first quarter of the 19th century, led by Bolívar in Greater Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, José de San Martín in the River Plate, Chile, and Peru, and Bernardo O'Higgins in Chile. Brazil took a different path. The French invasion of Portugal captured Lisbon on the 8th of December 1807, and the Portuguese Court moved its capital to Rio de Janeiro, which served as the empire's seat between 1808 and 1821. In 1822 the heir apparent Pedro proclaimed Brazil's independence and became its first emperor, in one of the most peaceful colonial independences ever seen. Power struggles followed. The Cisplatine War produced the independence of Uruguay in 1828, and after precariously defeating Peru in the War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1883, Chile emerged as the dominant power of the Pacific coast. An alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay ended Paraguayan ambitions in the War of the Triple Alliance of 1864 to 1870. A few countries gained independence only in the 20th century, including Panama from Colombia in 1903 and Guyana from the United Kingdom in 1966. The Great Depression pushed governments toward import substitution industrialization, aiming for self-sufficient economies. World War II drew the United States deep into the region through Lend-Lease, and Brazil was the only country to send an expeditionary force to the European theatre. The Cold War turned the continent into a battlefield. In the 1960s and 1970s, U.S.-aligned military dictatorships overthrew elected governments in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, detained tens of thousands, and collaborated through Operation Condor. By the early 1990s all countries had restored their democracies. Then came the turn to the left. Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Evo Morales of Bolivia were called the three musketeers of the left. By 2005 the BBC reported that three out of four of South America's 350 million people lived under left-leaning presidents. In 2008 the Union of South American Nations was founded to merge Mercosur and the Andean Community, which Noam Chomsky described as Latin America moving toward integration for the first time since the European conquest.