Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by on Friday February 10 2017, @02:16AM   Printer-friendly
from the 3d-nazca-lines dept.

The Amazonian rainforest was transformed over two thousand years ago by ancient people who built hundreds of large, mysterious earthworks.

Findings by Brazilian and UK experts provide new evidence for how indigenous people lived in the Amazon before European people arrived in the region.

The ditched enclosures, in Acre state in the western Brazilian Amazon, were concealed for centuries by trees. Modern deforestation has allowed the discovery of more than 450 of these large geometrical geoglyphs.

The function of these mysterious sites is still little understood -- they are unlikely to be villages, since archaeologists recover very few artefacts during excavation. The layout doesn't suggest they were built for defensive reasons. It is thought they were used only sporadically, perhaps as ritual gathering places.

The structures are ditched enclosures that occupy roughly 13,000 km2. Their discovery challenges assumptions that the rainforest ecosystem has been untouched by humans.

The archaeologists found evidence Amazonians practiced "agro-forestry" by cultivating economically valuable tree species.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @03:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @03:18AM (#465390)

    ... so many ancient peoples utterly squandered on the most unproductive crap. Just imagine how things might have gone had they spent that energy instead on storing food reserves, quarantine protocols, manipulation of water ingress/egress, etc.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @03:40AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @03:40AM (#465394)

    Maybe those earthworks were defensive structures, agricultural sites, pastures, landmarks for travelers, water collectors, or something else we haven't thought of.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @05:01AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @05:01AM (#465404)

      These are areas large enough to be villages, which means they were something less than productive, given the lack of effects.

      • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday February 10 2017, @04:04PM

        by Immerman (3985) on Friday February 10 2017, @04:04PM (#465503)

        And where is your evidence for lack of effects? Remember - you're not necessarily going to expect a whole lot of artifacts to begin with. Even at the best of times most artifacts are found in tombs, caves, and villages where durable trash accumulates. Everywhere else will tend to have very few artifacts.

        In addition, the Americas had basically no accessible metals so the wide variety of metal tools and decorations that might be found elsewhere mostly never existed here, and what little was available would have been too rare and valuable to be abandoned.

        Wood, bone, cloth, leather, rope, etc. artifacts won't survive 2000 years on the surface, especially in a tropical climate.

        So really the only artifacts that would be expected to have a good chance of survival are stone and fired pottery - both of which are extremely limited in their applications. If such materials weren't particularly relevant to the use of an area, you wouldn't expect to find many artifacts at all.

        Off the top of my head they could have been ceremonial or artistic sites, both of which could be extremely productive in ways that don't leave artifacts. Ornamental gardens where the nobility and philosophers like to congregate? Ceremonial sites that fostered peace between villages? Holy sites where people went for solace or communion? All of those can substantially benefit a culture, even if you insist on measuring benefit in strictly material forms.

        • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 10 2017, @06:20PM

          by Phoenix666 (552) on Friday February 10 2017, @06:20PM (#465559) Journal

          That's all true.

          We do know that contemporary Andean cultures did a lot of metalworking. We also know that the pre-Columbian cultures had extensive trade networks. So it's possible that the Amazonian cultures did aquire those items, even if they didn't have the material and means to produce them locally. As far as I know archaeologists haven't excavated the Amazon as extensively as other places, probably owing to the difficulty of the terrain. Deforestation and lidar have begun to reveal things that were hidden, such as the subject of this story.

          There is one archaeologist who has been through the Amazon pretty extensively, but he was focused on terra preta [wikipedia.org] and the causeways and mounds [upenn.edu] that people there built. They found that the rich, black terra preta soil was man-made, because it had bones and pottery sherds mixed in with it. And of the earthworks they said:

          The most impressive landscape feature in Baures are the dense networks of long causeways and canals that cross the savannas, wetlands and forested islands. A (possibly prehispanic) 15 km long causeway and canal connected the towns of Baures and Guacaraje until the 1930s when it was abandoned. Some segments of old causeways between local settlements and ranches are still used today for communication and transportation during the rainy season.

          So, even given the truth of what you said about artifacts, it's clear from the presence of terra preta throughout the Amazon and the earthworks described above that there was a lot of sophistication there. I've read that linguists who study Amazonian languages report (sorry, don't have a ready link for this one) the existence of titles for hierarchies that no longer exist in the societies that speak them, as if there were words for "governor" and "president" for a society that has nobody higher than a "mayor."

          --
          Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by driverless on Friday February 10 2017, @11:07AM

    by driverless (4770) on Friday February 10 2017, @11:07AM (#465452)

    so many ancient peoples utterly squandered on the most unproductive crap. Just imagine how things might have gone had they spent that energy instead on storing food reserves, quarantine protocols, manipulation of water ingress/egress, etc.

    ... suburbs full of McHuts, Tlachtli stadiums, walk-through Mixiotes restuarants, ...

  • (Score: 2) by deadstick on Friday February 10 2017, @04:45PM

    by deadstick (5110) on Friday February 10 2017, @04:45PM (#465526)

    That has occurred to me on visiting the great cathedrals of Europe. The erection of 100+ meter towers with ropes and pulleys, the carving of innumerable exquisite saints...and it didn't keep the plagues away.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @06:01PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10 2017, @06:01PM (#465549)

      Things are headed back that direction. Think about the huge number of highly educated people wasting their lives checking for statistical significance and pumping out papers about experiments that will never be reproduced, etc. The default state seems to be people wasting each others time.