New Scientist
10 December 2009 by Linda Geddes
Magazine issue 2738.
Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia.
Uncovering civilisation (Image: Edison Caetano)
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 – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.
"It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. "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.
Garden villages
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.
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Antiquity
Volume: 83 Number: 322 Page: 1084–1095
Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purús: a complex society in western Amazonia
Martti Pärssinen1, Denise Schaan2 and Alceu Ranzi3
1Instituto Iberoamericano de Finlandia, c/o General Arrando, 5, bajo izq., 28010 Madrid, Spain (Email: martti.parssinen@madrid.fi) 2Universidade Federal do Pará – IFCH, Rua Augusto Correa, 1, 66075-110 – Belém, Pará, Brazil (Email: denise@marajoara.com) 3Laboratório de Paleontologia, Campus da Universidade Federal do Acre. 69915-000 – Rio Branco, Brazil (Email: alceuranzi@hotmail.com)
It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The combination of land cleared of its rainforest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon Basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads. Introducing us to this new civilisation, the authors show that the ‘geoglyph culture’ stretches over a region more than 250km across, and exploits both the floodplains and the uplands. They also suggest that we have so far seen no more than a tenth of it.
Keywords: Amazonia, pre-Columbian, Acre River, Purús River, Andes, monumentality, earthworks, geoglyphs
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