**Abstract**

The prehistoric Amazon had low numbers of hunter-gatherers due to poor soil and harsh landscape conditions, due to which it was not able to support advanced cultures. The arrival of Christian missionaries, oil companies, and farmers changed the lifestyle of a specific portion of the population, although some indigenous groups still avoid contact with the outside world. Missionaries stimulated changes in the indigenous medical-religious-political systems. In the Peruvian Amazon, the local government is too weak to carry out the usual functions of the state, and therefore oil companies have replaced the state in terms of various functions such as employment, building wells for the drinking water, healthcare, donation of electric generators, and aircraft transport of local indigenous authorities to meetings in Iquitos or Lima. The policies of the national government are turning the Peruvian Amazon into a productive area and are exploiting its natural raw materials. In modernising the Amazon region, however, the world is permanently and irreparably losing valuable knowledge regarding the nature of tropical areas.

**Keywords:** Peruvian Amazon, foreign influence, indigenous people, missionairies, oil industry, plantation agriculture, deforestation, loss of knowledge regarding the tropics

## **1. Introduction**

Migrations of people, especially of the intense variety, bring change to societies and landscapes. The Amazon has historically been sparsely settled, mostly by hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers. Its settlements are small and spread far and wide throughout the vast forests. The largest South American cultures and empires arose in the Andes, along the Pacific Ocean coast, and in the lowlands in the southern part of the continent, while the Amazon was bypassed. Numerous researchers have searched the jungle for signs of highly-developed Amazonian civilisations, but none succeeded in finding anything—their attempts have resulted rather in great stories of adventure and valuable ethnic documentation. Franciscan monks founded a church and monastery in Santa Rosa de Ocopa in the Peruvian Andes 300 years ago to serve as a missionary school and destination for missionary work in the Amazon. During the 20th century, companies and states "discovered" the Amazon as a new area of development. This primarily meant exploitation of natural resources such as oil, natural gas, hydro energy, wood, and agriculture. Today, road networks are spreading along with pipelines, and harbours and airports are being built. Along with the development of business, workers from the Andes and other parts of the world are flocking to the Amazon. Concurrently, indigenous

peoples are losing their territory and strong deforestation processes are underway. The world also regards the Amazon in ecological terms, referring to it as the "lungs of the world". Numerous politicians of Amazonian states look at the jungle in terms of what it could mean for economic development of their respective states. Many local politicians think that what is happening to the Amazon now is what European settlers did to both Europe and North America over the last several centuries: cut down the forests; developed agricultural land; opened new business opportunities; and spread their civilisation.

In this chapter, our goal is to confirm the reasons for the arrival of settlers in the Amazon, and the significance of individual activities and how they transform nature and society. Special emphasis is placed on logging and the widespread process of deforestation, whereby we are interested in the consequences of cutting down the forest from various aspects: the effectiveness of agricultural activity; maintenance of biological diversity; and the influence of climate change on indigenous communities. Special attention is given to the adoption of the principle of market exchange, i.e. the exchange of money for goods/services, in indigenous communities, as well as key related sociological changes within indigenous societies themselves. Important landscape changes in the Amazon often happen due to deforestation, but in this chapter we explore other types of landscape change that are rarely mentioned in scientific and profession literature: the emergence and spread of networks of modern settlements that are planned in a completely different way than traditional indigenous settlements. In our analysis of modern plans of the Peruvian government, as well as similar projects of Peruvian and foreign companies, we touch on both the strategic and geopolitical dimensions of exploitation of the Amazon. Finally, we also cover the vanishing Amazon forests and indigenous way of life, and with them knowledge regarding the tropics and the Amazon itself—a great loss for the entire world.
