|
Part I Reading Comprehension (40 points)
Passage 1
In 1942 Allan R. Holmberg, a doctoral student in anthropology from Yale
University, USA, ventured deep into the jungle of Bolivian Amazonia and
searched out an isolated land of Siriono Indians. The Siriono, Holmberg later
wrote, led a “strikingly backward” existence. Their villages were little more
than clusters of thatched huts. Life itself was a perpetual and punishing search
for food: some families grew manioc and other starchy crops in small garden
plots cleared from the forest, while other members of the tribe scoured the
country for small game and promising fish holes. When local resources became
depleted, the tribe moved on. As for technology, Holmberg noted, the Siriono
“may be classified among the most handicapped peoples of the world”. Other
than bows, arrows and crude digging sticks, the only tools the Siriono seemed
to possess were “two machetes worn to the size of pocket-knives”.
Although the lives of the Siriono have changed in the intervening decades, the
image of them as Stone Age relics has endured. Indeed, in many respects the
Siriono epitomize the popular conception of life in Amazonia. To casual
observers, as well as to influential natural scientists and regional planners, the
luxuriant forests of Amazonia seem ageless, unconquerable, a habitat totally
hostile to human civilization. The apparent simplicity of Indian ways of life has
been judged as an evolutionary adaptation to forest ecology, living proof that
Amazonia could not — and cannot — sustain a more complex society.
Archaeological traces of far more elaborate cultures have been dismissed as the
ruins of invaders from outside the region, abandoned to decay in the
uncompromising tropical environment.
The popular conception of Amazonia and its native residents would be
enormously consequential if it were true. But the human history of Amazonia in
the past 11,000 years betrays that view as myth. Evidence gathered in recent
years from anthropology and archaeology indicates that the region has
supported a series of indigenous cultures for eleven thousand years; an
extensive network of complex societies — some with populations perhaps as
large as 100,000 - thrived there for more than 1,000 years before the arrival of
，更多更新年份持续更新，请在本站的考博信息网|www.kaoboinfo.com中的“考研试卷库”学校栏目中查询下载。
|
您现在的位置： 
