Play farming’ of this sort, in the Amazon as elsewhere, has had its recent advantages for indigenous peoples. Elaborate and unpredictable subsistence routines are an excellent deterrent against the colonial State: an ecology of freedom in the literal sense. It is difficult to tax and monitor a group that refuses to stay in one location, obtaining its livelihood without making long-term commitments to fixed resources, or growing much of its food invisibly underground (as with tubers and other root vegetables).47 While this may be so, the deeper history of the American tropics shows that similarly loose and flexible patterns of food production sustained civilizational growth on a continent-wide scale, long before Europeans arrived.