(posting from mobile, apologies for bad formatting)

The article in question, 1491, offers a lot to chew on, and informs the reader if the on-going pre-Columbian contact population debate, raises the possibility that the "vast wilderness" was a result of mass dying by the "keystone" species (homo).

In this all, the possibility is raised that the Amazon is an enormous cultural artifact that was intentionally created, and only became the jungle wilderness we know them when the populations were wiped out by disease:

"Unlike Europeans, who planted mainly annual crops, the Indians, [Charles R. Clement] says, centered their agriculture on the Amazon's unbelievably diverse assortment of trees: fruits, nuts, and palms. "It's tremendously difficult to clear fields with stone tools," Clement says. "If you can plant trees, you get twenty years of productivity out of your work instead of two or three."

Planting their orchards, the first Amazonians transformed large swaths of the river basin into something more pleasing to human beings. In a widely cited article from 1989, William Balée, the Tulane anthropologist, cautiously estimated that about 12 percent of the nonflooded Amazon forest was of anthropogenic origin—directly or indirectly created by human beings. In some circles this is now seen as a conservative position. ...

.... "Landscape" in this case is meant exactly—Amazonian Indians literally created the ground beneath their feet. According to William I. Woods, a soil geographer at Southern Illinois University, ecologists' claims about terrible Amazonian land were based on very little data. In the late 1990s Woods and others began careful measurements in the lower Amazon. They indeed found lots of inhospitable terrain. But they also discovered swaths of terra preta*—rich, fertile "black earth" that anthropologists increasingly believe was created by human beings....

Not all Xingu cultures left behind this living earth, they discovered. But the ones that did generated it rapidly—suggesting to Woods that terra preta was created deliberately. In a process reminiscent of dropping microorganism-rich starter into plain dough to create sourdough bread, Amazonian peoples, he believes, inoculated bad soil with a transforming bacterial charge. Not every group of Indians there did this, but quite a few did, and over an extended period of time.

When Woods told me this, I was so amazed that I almost dropped the phone. I ceased to be articulate for a moment and said things like "wow" and "gosh." Woods chuckled at my reaction, probably because he understood what was passing through my mind. Faced with an ecological problem, I was thinking, the Indians fixed it. They were in the process of terraforming the Amazon when Columbus showed up..."

Has this view advanced any, or is it still viewed as a "radical" position, as indicated in the article? What discoveries or conclusions since 2002 have helped shape the outcome of this debate?