Lost towns' discovered in Amazon

[dipsydoodle]

cross psot from State & Country Forums » Latin America : http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=405&topic_id=7354&mesg_id=7354

The remote Amazon river basin was once home to densely populated towns and villages, Science journal reports.

This part of the Amazon, once thought to be virgin forest, has in fact been touched by extensive human activity.

Researchers found traces of a grid-like pattern of settlements connected by road networks and arranged around large central plazas.
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The ancient urban communities date back to before the first Europeans set foot in the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon in the 15th Century.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7586860.stm

My thanks to Judi Lynn for posting the BBC link which I'd omitted. :hi:

[Judi Lynn]

1. Had to hear more about this: Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized

August 28, 2008 in Archaeology & Paleontology

Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized
It's not Rio de Janeiro or even ancient Athens but anthropologists uncover evidence of urban settlements
By David Biello

In 1925 British adventurer Colonel Percy Fawcett disappeared into the wilds of the Amazon, never to be heard from again after going there in search of a lost city he called Z. But decades later, a city of sorts—actually a series of settlements connected by roads—has been found at the headwaters of the Xingu River where Fawcett went missing in an area previously buried beneath the dense foliage in what is now Xingu National Park.

Anthropologist Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida teamed with the local Kuikuro people in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso to uncover 28 towns, villages and hamlets that may have supported as many as 50,000 people within roughly 7,700 square miles (20,000 square kilometers) of forest—an area slightly smaller than New Jersey. The larger towns boasted defensive ditches 10 feet (three meters) deep and 33 feet (10 meters) wide backed by a wooden palisade as well as large plazas, some reaching 490 feet (150 meters) across.

The remains of houses and ceramic cooking utensils show that humans occupied these cities for around 1,000 years, from roughly 1,500 years to as recently as 400 years ago. Satellite pictures reveal that during that time, the inhabitants carved roads through the jungle; all plaza villages had a major road that ran northeast to southwest along the summer solstice axis and linked to other settlements as much as three miles (five kilometers) away. There were bridges on some of the roads and others had canoe canals running alongside them.

The remains of the settlements also hint at surrounding large fields of manioc, or cassava (a starchy root that is still a staple part of the Brazilian diet) as well as the earthen dams and artificial ponds of fish farming, still practiced by people who may be the present-day descendants of the Kuikuro. Although such "garden cities," as Heckenberger describes them in Science, do not match the dense urbanism of contemporary Brazilian metropolises such as Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, they do blend seamlessly into the jungle and maximize use of limited natural resources. They also suggest that the rainforest bears the marks of intense human habitation, rather than being pristine.

More:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=lost-amazon-cities

[Judi Lynn]

2. National Geographic: Evidence of Ancient Towns Found in Amazon Basin

Evidence of Ancient Towns Found in Amazon Basin
Hillary Mayell
for National Geographic News

September 25, 2003
Far from being a pristine wilderness prior to Columbus's arrival in the New World, parts of the Brazilian Amazon more closely resembled a pre- historic version of urban sprawl.

Michael J. Heckenberger and colleagues have identified at least 19 settlements dating from A.D. 1250 to 1600 in the Xingu region of Brazil's Amazon forest. Connected by a complex set of interlinking roads, the villages were defined by ditches, curbs, moats, open parklands, and working forests. The researchers estimate that some clusters of six to 12 villages may have been home to as many as 2,500 to 5,000 people.

"The idea that people lived in small, dispersed, autonomous villages, moving around and living in a delicate balance with nature is just a fantasy," said Heckenberger, an archaeologist at the University of Florida. "Five hundred years ago Amazonian society was comparable with developments in North America, Africa, Asia, much of temperate Europe in 1492, in terms of scale and sociocultural innovation."

"The region supported a fairly dense, settled population," he said. "The Xinguano people built their villages according to a very clear plan, at a very large scale, and all of them are interconnected with one another. The sophistication of the layout bespeaks a knowledge of mathematics, architecture, astronomy, and engineering."

The study is published in the September 19 issue of the journal Science.

Looking at a Regional System

Heckenberger and colleagues mapped all of the sites within a 15 mile by 15 mile square (24 by 24 kilometers) in order to understand the study area as a regional system.

Dating from roughly 400 to 750 years ago, the 19 villages are approximately two to three miles (three to five kilometers) apart, connected by straight roads that have curbs and are as much as 165 feet (50 meters) wide in some places. Each village has a central circular plaza. Ditches up to 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) long and 16 feet (5 meters) deep surround the villages.

More:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/09/0925_030925_lostamazon.html

[Judi Lynn]

3. 'Pristine' Amazonian region hosted large, urban civilization, study finds

14:09 EST, August 28, 2008
'Pristine' Amazonian region hosted large, urban civilization, study finds

They aren't the lost cities early explorers sought fruitlessly to discover. But ancient settlements in the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by tropical forest, were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to both medieval European and ancient Greek communities.

So says a paper set to appear Friday in Science co-authored by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.

"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Mike Heckenberger, a UF professor of anthropology and the lead author of the paper. "Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."

The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists have considered virgin tropical forests are in fact heavily influenced by historic human activity. Not only that, but the settlements – consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza – suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.

More:
http://www.physorg.com/news139151351.html

More articles from same source:
http://www.topix.com/science/anthropology/2008/08/amazon-region-hosted-large-urban-civilization

[Judi Lynn]

4. Kick!

:kick: :kick: :kick: