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