New Evidence For Big Pre-Columbian Civilization

One of the depressions near Santarém, possibly an ancient reservoir.

Pre-Columbian Indian societies that once lived in the Amazon rainforests may have been much larger and more advanced than researchers previously realized, according to archaeologists from Brazil. Working with archaeologists from the University of Gothenburg, the team has located the remains of approximately 90 settlements in an area near the city of Santarém in the Brazilian part of the Amazon.

“The most surprising thing is that many of these settlements are a long way from rivers, and are located in rainforest areas that extremely sparsely populated today,” says Per Stenborg from the Department of Historical Studies, who led the Swedish part of the archaeological investigations in the area over the summer.

According to BioScholar:

Traditionally archaeologists have thought that these inland areas were sparsely populated also before the arrival of the Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries. One reason for this assumption is that the soils found in the inland generally is quite infertile; another reason is that access to water is poor during dry periods as these areas are situated at long distances from the major watercourses. 

It has therefore been something of a mystery that the earliest historical account; from Spaniard Francisco de Orellana’s journey along the River Amazon in 1541-42, depicted the Amazon as a densely populated region with what the Spanish described as “towns,” situated not only along the river itself, but also in the inland. 

The archaeologists have come across areas of very fertile soil scattered around the otherwise infertile land. These soils are not natural, but have been created by humans.

“Just as importantly, we found round depressions in the landscape, some as big as a hundred metres in diameter, by several of the larger settlements,” says Stenborg. “These could be the remains of water reservoirs, built to secure water supply during dry periods.”

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Ancient Amazonia Was Home to Millions

Traces of ancient Amazonian structures visible by satellite.

Instead of virgin jungle untouched by humans, the Amazon forest was home to a spectacular civilization capable of managing the jungle and cultivating crops to feed perhaps 20 million people, according to recent archaeological researchers.

According to the Washington Post:

The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that the Amazon, unlike much of the Americas, was a historical black hole, its environment too hostile and its earth too poor to have ever sustained big, sedentary societies. Only small and primitive hunter-gatherer tribes, the assumption went, could ever have eked out a living in an unforgiving environment.

But scientists now believe that instead of stone-age tribes, like the groups that occasionally emerge from the forest today, the Indians who inhabited the Amazon centuries ago numbered as many as 20 million, far more people than live here today. “There is a gigantic footprint in the forest,” said Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo, 49, a Colombian-born professor at the University of Florida who is working this swath in northeast Peru.

The evidence is not just here outside tiny San Martin de Samiria, an indigenous hamlet hours by speed boat from the jungle city of Iquitos, according to the Post article. It is found across Amazonia.

Along the Xingu, an Amazon tributary in Brazil, Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida has found moats, causeways, canals, the networks of a stratified civilization that, he says, existed as early as A.D. 800. 

In Bolivia, American, German and Finnish archaeologists have been studying how pre-Columbian Indians moved tons of soil and diverted rivers, major projects of a society that existed long before the birth of Christ.

Click here for the Washington Post article.

Signs Found of Early Amazonian Civilization

Geoglyphs such as this on the Brazilian border are about 2000 years old.

Traces of a previously unknown ancient civilization are emerging from beneath the felled trees straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century, there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin. Now deforestation, air travel and satellite imagery are indicating otherwise.

"It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil. "Every week we find new structures."

Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.

According to New Scientist:

Their discovery, in an area of northern Bolivia and western Brazil, follows other recent reports of vast sprawls of interconnected villages known as "garden cities" in north central Brazil, dating from around AD 1400. But the structures unearthed at the garden city sites are not as consistently similar or geometric as the geoglyphs, Schaan says.

"I firmly believe that the garden cities of Xingu and the geoglyphs were not directly related," says Martti Pärssinen of the Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes in Madrid, Spain, who works with Schaan. "Nevertheless, both discoveries demonstrate that [upland] areas of western Amazonia were heavily populated much before the European incursion."

The geoglyphs are formed by ditches up to 11 metres wide and 1 to 2 metres deep. They range from 90 to 300 metres in diameter and are thought to date from around 2000 years ago up to the 13th century.

Click here for the New Scientist article.