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Satellite images have been used to identify 81 newly discovered Pre-Columbian sites, including single hamlets, villages, fortified settlements, and roads, in a remote region of the Amazon rainforest:
The remains of dozens of fortified villages, built before the arrival of Europeans, have been found in a relatively remote region of the Amazon. It seems the southern periphery of the Amazon was home to a million people before 1500 AD – far more than assumed.
"Most of the Amazon is still unexplored archaeologically," says Jonas De Souza of the University of Exeter, UK. "The more we survey, the more we realise that different parts of the basin were more settled than we thought."
The first Europeans to travel to the Amazon reported seeing widespread settlements, including cities and roads. But their reports were later dismissed as fantasies. For centuries, the prevailing view of the Amazon was that it was largely a pristine wilderness before Columbus and other Europeans arrived. Supposedly, only around a million people lived in the entire Amazon basin.
In recent decades, deforestation has helped reveal evidence of extensive ancient settlements, such as large earthworks. It now appears the whole river basin was home to perhaps ten million people before Europeans arrived. Disease and genocide later wiped most of them out, and the rainforest hid the evidence. "We have changed our idea about the Amazon," says De Souza.
Pre-Columbian earth-builders settled along the entire southern rim of the Amazon (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03510-7) (DX)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 29 2018, @02:59PM (1 child)
I'm glad this story has gotten more publicity than such stories usually get. The pre-Columbian Americas have a much more interesting history and reality than we appreciate today. As I've commented on such stories on Soylent in the past, Indian societies were much more populous and sophisticated than the average person has learned in history class. We can thank the use of LIDAR for archaeological purposes for supplying more hard, undeniable evidence to authenticate that.
For example, the Mississippian culture constructed earthen mounds from Minnesota to Florida in efforts that required organization, engineering, and sophistication on par with that it took to build the Egyptian pyramids, but nearly no graduate of the American education system even knows about the Mississippians. At most they mentioned Cahokia in Illinois, but in isolation and only in passing. They had a consistent cultural and trade sphere across the enormous drainage of the Mississippi, from the Dakotas to Pittsburgh, from Oklahoma to Georgia and Florida.
And the really mind-blowing part is that not only has hardly anyone heard of the Mississippian culture, but that the Mississippian was only the third of such vast, sophisticated mound-building cultures. It was preceded by the Hopewell and Adena cultures. And those are only those cultures in that same area. You could talk equally about the Anasazi/Puebloan achievements in the Southwest, or many others in Central and South America. There are oceans of human achievement there that are ignored.
But the historical narrative of European technological, organizational, and cultural superiority still prevails in the public mind in America.
For me, only pandemic could explain such a pervasive collapse of those societies. Even ecological over-extension, as has been proposed for the downfall of the Maya, would have been localized. Even prolonged drought, which may have brought North American societies to their knees, would not have occurred in South America at the same time.
My own pet theory is that the pandemics were carried over by the Vikings who settled at L'Anse aux Meadows and other as-yet undiscovered locations in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1000 AD and introduced through the Indian trade networks by contacts with the Beothuks and Mikmaq (the Skraelings). We know those trade networks were extensive because they have found jade from Mexico all over North America, copper from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan all over the place, and obsidian from Yellowstone thousands of miles away. It would have been natural for germs to travel along with the trade goods.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 29 2018, @05:03PM
i read about the Mississippians when i was investigating giants. some colorful characters say that there were Caucasoid giants living in north america before the mongoloid migrants/invaders wiped them out. i haven't had time to see if there is any real evidence for this seemingly wild theory.