Ecuador's colonial past 'written in soil'
August 1, 2018 8:35 AM Subscribe
The arrival of European settlers in Ecuador had a profound effect on the country's population and environment.
Researchers studying soil cores from the Quijos valley found that they revealed a detailed story of the area's history after Spanish settlers arrived in the 1500s.
The subsequent decimation of the region's indigenous population is told by surprising historians - plants.
Researchers studying soil cores from the Quijos valley found that they revealed a detailed story of the area's history after Spanish settlers arrived in the 1500s.
The subsequent decimation of the region's indigenous population is told by surprising historians - plants.
This is really cool research, a micro-focus on history of a time and place. Collectively, it all adds up to what some call the "Orbis Spike" centered on 1610, which reflects the post-epidemic reforestation of Central and South American agricultural land that there were few left to cultivate, and no need for the crops. This sucked a lot of Carbon out of the atmosphere, may have played a role in the "Little Ice Age" global cooling, and most interestingly perhaps, has left a record of mass death and genocide in the Antarctic Ice sheets.
While hard rock geologists favour the atomic bomb testing global signature (radionuclides in sediments) as the long term marker of the onset of the "Anthropocene epoch" that signature doesn't really reflect a global change in the way epochs should define. Conversely, the massive impacts of the "Columbian Exchange" - with disruption (homogenization) of the world's flora and fauna, and unprecedented levels of human mass death and the ecological impacts of that, is arguably a much more significant epoch-defining event.
Within this context, studies like this Ecuador one then return one to the human-scale and local-scale impacts of colonialism in an emotional way - like the Diary of Anne Frank is a synecdoche for the Holocaust.
posted by Rumple at 11:00 AM on August 1, 2018 [15 favorites]
While hard rock geologists favour the atomic bomb testing global signature (radionuclides in sediments) as the long term marker of the onset of the "Anthropocene epoch" that signature doesn't really reflect a global change in the way epochs should define. Conversely, the massive impacts of the "Columbian Exchange" - with disruption (homogenization) of the world's flora and fauna, and unprecedented levels of human mass death and the ecological impacts of that, is arguably a much more significant epoch-defining event.
Within this context, studies like this Ecuador one then return one to the human-scale and local-scale impacts of colonialism in an emotional way - like the Diary of Anne Frank is a synecdoche for the Holocaust.
posted by Rumple at 11:00 AM on August 1, 2018 [15 favorites]
some further reading on the ecological impact of colonialism
posted by poffin boffin at 11:06 AM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by poffin boffin at 11:06 AM on August 2, 2018 [2 favorites]
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Engels- The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man
posted by Glomar response at 9:26 AM on August 1, 2018 [8 favorites]