advance ancient amazon river culture

The northwestern tribes "farmed" fish so to speak they didn't exist completely without organized economic geared towards food production.

Well, exactly. It wasn't agriculture, but I don't think you can have complex societies and relatively large population without some form of "organized economic geared towards food production" (although probably even simpler hunter-gatherer societies may have that).
 
So what if Orellana had found an empire on the scale of Classical Tikal, or Inca Empire?

He may very well have found that, If not more. The Terra Prieta mounds in Amazonia are extensive. His descriptions speak of constant settlement along the river.
The evidence is for a substantial population pre "Columbian Exchange".

The Mounds would have supported significant agriculture independent of the Rain Forest ecology.

The issue is that the Amazonian culture, as far as I can tell, was impoverished by a lack of Minerals. They were great potters, but had no metal to speak of.

Additionally, there seems to have been more than one Amazonian culture. Some were in the upper reaches of the watershed and some were in the Delta and some were in between.

The environment there does not treat artifacts with kindness, so our knowledge is sketchy at best.



The book 1491 is a great start to investigating this possibility
 

norse

Banned
there is a lot that the amazons could gain from trade

there are a lot of trade goods to be found in the amazonian rainforest
 
Just FYI, terra preta only dates back to ~450 BC.

At least, that's the radiocarbon age of the earliest dated bits. However, there appear to be vast swathes of terra preta that have not been explored at all, let alone radiocarbon dated.

Given the typical expansion patterns of other cultures/civilizations, I would expect that the formative Amazon civilization was confined to a fairly small area (in comparison to the entire Amazon basin, it could still be fairly large in absolute terms) for many centuries, and that particular area has not yet been dated (or even found). So the earliest terra preta, when it's eventually found, might date to many centuries earlier than 450 BC.
 
At least, that's the radiocarbon age of the earliest dated bits. However, there appear to be vast swathes of terra preta that have not been explored at all, let alone radiocarbon dated.

Given the typical expansion patterns of other cultures/civilizations, I would expect that the formative Amazon civilization was confined to a fairly small area (in comparison to the entire Amazon basin, it could still be fairly large in absolute terms) for many centuries, and that particular area has not yet been dated (or even found). So the earliest terra preta, when it's eventually found, might date to many centuries earlier than 450 BC.

Even so, 450 BC is still a very long time ago and there is plenty of time for a civilization to develop
 
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