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Aletheia

The Emptied Amazon · source record · paper

A Bluff Model of Riverine Settlement in Prehistoric Amazonia

William M. Denevan; Annals of the Association of American Geographers · 1996

AI-verified citationSRC-DENEVAN-1996
identifier / locator
Annals AAG 86(4):654–681, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01771.x
url
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1996.tb01771.x
verification note
Publisher page is bot-walled; verified 2026-08-28 via Wayback capture of the abstract plus a full-text OCR copy — the Oviedo/Medina passage and the bluff-model wording were checked verbatim.

Evidence drawn from this source

Supports· strongAMZ-E005

Denevan: the extreme figures are absent from the Oviedo manuscript branch

what the source states
"There is no mention of 50,000 or 10,000 and 8,000 warriors as there is in the Medina (and Muñoz) versions… nor of villages 4 or 5 leagues in length. There is one mention of 5,000 warriors in the Oviedo version."
limitations
  • Verified from a Wayback abstract plus an OCR full-text copy; page numbers per the OCR pagination.
William M. Denevan (1996)AI-verified citationAMZ-C002
Qualifies· moderateAMZ-E006

The bluff model: sporadic riverine settlement concentrated where channels meet bluffs

what the source states
"However, bluff occupation was sporadic rather than continuous, with large settlements mostly located where main river channels impinged against bluffs."
what we infer
A settlement geography of dense reaches alternating with empty ones is exactly the pattern Carvajal reports — including his empty stretches — which turns his account from "continuous metropolis" rhetoric into a testable spatial prediction.
William M. Denevan (1996)AI-verified citationAMZ-C001