The Prehistoric Archaeologists - Essay Example

Scholars are able to know the way that people with no written records lived through prehistoric archaeology. Prehistoric archaeologists gather information about the life of people that had no written records through the study of objects under the ground. It is these objects that give them an insight into the way and manner that these prehistoric people lived. Archaeologists do this through excavations, field surveys, and the laboratory study of materials collected beneath the surface of the earth. The remains and fossils of people with no written records are studied by scholars to get a hint into how these people lived (Renfrew & Bahn, 2000).

It is generally believed that during prehistoric times, the society in the regions around the Amazon was more like a homogenous one and that the Amazon people were people that had little resources at their disposal. But, this has been refuted as recent studies have shown that they were indeed a complex society (Levi-Strauss, 1997). The discovery of immense earthworks and huge sedentary communities in the Amazon has shown that the prehistoric society around the region was not homogenous as people have been made to believe. The high quality of the cultural and ecological diversity of the prehistoric society of the region around the Amazon was something that was not in any way comparable to other societies that existed at that time.

It was colonialism and imperialism that ensured the European domination of the New World. The Europeans institutionalized policies that made them rule the nations of the New World and developed trade for their own benefit. The Europeans also had very strong political, military, and economic empires that made the domination of the New World very easy for them. It should also be noted that the colonial period represented a bad imperial experience for the region of the New World as these regions experienced a kind of hardship that made them play second fiddle to their European colonial masters and the devastating effect of colonialism is still felt by the original inhabitants of the New World. This is due to the fact that the Native Americans now exist as minority groups to the Europeans in the New World (Smith, 2000).

The reason that an entire group of people could go into extinction such as the people around the Marajo of the Amazon is due to the war that existed between the people of the region around the Amazon. Rivals in the region around the Amazon are the only plausible reason that an entire group of people would be wiped out as it would now become a case of the survival of the fittest and the strongest (Davis, 1997).