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.
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avoiding my chores for an hour or so by trying to see what combination of path/element we might expect sooner than later.
some fun observations:
destruction and nihility are the only paths with every element covered; no element has all seven paths covered
the most popular path is destruction, the least is preservation
the most popular elements are ice and physical, the least are imaginary and wind
the only combinations we have two characters for are lightning erudition, ice preservation and physical destruction
we are still missing a handful of combinations -
btw i know a bunch of upcoming characters probably already got their paths/elements leaked, please dont mention that or any leaks on this post or i will block you ✌️ thx
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Man ty for popping up on my dashboard. I miss voltron, but whenever I try to check what's up I get reaaally bad flashbacks as to how the fandom was. It's kinda worse when u accidentally triggered a community of a popular ship (its not kl@nce) :')))) hnghjgn idk how u do it
voltron is just. such a funny phenomenon. the show was like a C+ at BEST but we all stuck around anyway clinging to the hope that things would eventually improve and then they NEVER did. & so we all had to make do with literal scraps and we were RESOURCEFUL!!! 😭 I have honestly never seen a fandom where the fan content was so divorced from the actual source material like 💀💀💀 and i think this scarcity of good content forced people to be extra creative, which is why the voltron fandom was 1) so genuinely hilarious and 2) full of content producing MACHINES
Literally all we could do was just talk to each other. we were forced to survive off each other’s kindness & it made everyone super co-dependent. it really was a bunch of high schoolers forming parasocial relationships with other high schoolers; of course it got messy!!
also this is such a minor detail in the grand scheme of things but voltron hit tumblr at like the exact time social media became more accessible to people under 13 years old. and like. conflict and discourse is an inevitable part of fandom. but the end result was we had college students picking fights with LITERAL middle schoolers. and I genuinely cannot believe we all thought this was normal behavior!!!!!
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