By Peter Speetjens A professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago, Anna Roosevelt has been dubbed the “matriarch” of archaeology in the Amazon River Basin. In a career spanning some 40 years, she has authored more than a hundred scientific articles and a dozen books, which helped accomplish a radical shift in the way we perceive the past of the human presence in the Amazon. Known as environmental determinism, the dominant view for decades was that the tropical rainforest was too hostile, too wet, too infertile to bring forth any complex culture. Additionally, the human prese…