#but look it does have a distinctly doctrine of discovery flavor if you ask me

[notwiselybuttoowell]

At midday on the road into Grünland, a Mennonite colony in the Bolivian department of Beni, the only sound is a distant chainsaw.

On either side, strips of deforested land extend into the distance. Underfoot, the soil is scattered with shards of ceramic and bone: remnants of the pre-Columbian peoples that this part of the Bolivian Amazon, known as the Llanos de Mojos, once supported.

Archaeologists are only just beginning to understand the scale and complexity of these societies, but all the while, the agricultural frontier keeps advancing, destroying sites before they can be studied. The environmental damage of deforestation is well-known, but the Llanos de Mojos reveals another side of its impact: the loss of human history.

Grünland was founded in 2005 by Mennonites, members of the tightly-nit Anabaptist Christian group that began arriving in South America in the early 20th century, in search of isolation and lands to cultivate.

In one field, a Mennonite man called Guillermo was resting in the shade of his tractor. He cheerfully acknowledged finding ceramics and bones while working the land.

Umberto Lombardo, an Italian earth scientist and one of a handful of academics who study the archaeology of Beni, probed gently with questions about the topography of the land when it was first deforested.

The Llanos de Mojos is an almost completely flat region, so any elevated areas are a sure sign of human activity. Lombardo walked about, stopping here and there to pick pieces from the earth of what was once a vast human-made mound, now partly flattened by the farmers.

“The surface of the site is completely destroyed, changed, because the earth has been moved, the pottery broken,” said Lombardo. “That part of the archaeological archive is lost.”

The Mennonites are just one facet of Bolivia’s booming agribusiness, and what is happening in Grünland is happening all over Beni.

The Bolivian government has big plans for the sector. Today, the country has roughly 4m hectares of cultivated land and 10 million cattle. By 2025, the government wants 13m hectares and 18 million cattle.

On the current trajectory the government will undershoot those targets substantially. Nonetheless it has boosted the sector’s growth by allowing more deforestation and reducing fines for illegal deforestation.

In 2021, Global Forest Watch placed Bolivia third in the world for loss of primary forest, behind Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ranked by population, Bolivia is first by a distance.

Most of this deforestation is happening in two departments: Santa Cruz and Beni. But it is in Beni that a unique archaeological heritage is at risk.

“Archaeology is everywhere in Beni,” said Lombardo. “They say if you put up a roof, you have a museum.”

The Amazon basin was once considered to be pristine wilderness, but a growing body of research has found traces of a vast network of earthworks predating the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas and implying the existence of large, complex societies.