The important lesson is not that ancient people left no ecological footprint, but that a heavily managed landscape can still remain remarkably biodiverse

My understanding of why Europeans think the americas were pristine and barely touched by human existence is because smallpox was ahead of European explorers and by the time Europeans set foot on many places on the continent, they saw ecosystems that had recovered from human intervention after the local population had collapsed.

Yes, few years ago I was really surprised to learn that much of highly fertile amazon soil patches were created by humans using biochar. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta

The headline literally says they lived in 3% of the forest area, which implies that the vast majority of the rest of the forest actually was untouched

That is definitely not what the Maya did. Or really any civilization with large permanent cities. The record of forest cutting once settlements reach a certain size is consistent and global. The Amazon simply experienced a full civilizational collapse and more than enough time untouched to recover.

It might suffice to say: The myth of sophisticated indigenous ecosystem engineers who harmonize with nature is a European trope.

Whenever any culture larger and more settled than hunter-gatherers has traditions of forest management and ecosystem balance, don't immediately attribute to them magical wisdom that Europeans somehow lack. Consider that those traditions are an ancient memory of one or more catastrophic ecosystem collapses and the practices of the people who survived them.

> shaping the rainforest for centuries without destroying it.

More accurately, shaping the rainforest the all dying so the rainforest grows back.

They didn't live under the canopy, they cut it down.

if you dont destroy something, its usually close to an idea of pristine.

the trouble is slash and burn agriculture and clearing for beef production.