Summary

Author Charles C. Mann, archaeologist Clark Erickson and William Balee an anthropologist, traveled to the Beni which is a Bolivian province the size of a combined Illinois and Indiana. Archaeologists and researchers had been drawn to the area because it was one of the only regions on earth in which its inhabitants had never seen Westerners with cameras.

Erickson believed that the structured landscape which featured tall mounds had been designed by an advanced society that lived a thousand years before. Erickson and Balee were both of a new school of thought about the nature of societies that existed in the Americas prior to the European “invasion.” They believed that these societies were not small and isolated and that native Indians had a much greater impact on their environment than previously thought. They also believed that the continents had not...