Geo-Glyphs And Geo-Polities: Amazonia's Surprising Past
npr:
Sometime between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago, people living in the Amazon region of what is now Brazil constructed huge land carvings: geo-glyphs in the shape of squares, circles, ovals, rectangles and octagons.
The New York Times reported on these geo-glyphs last week. These ceremonial symbols — if indeed, as some archaeologists suspect, that’s what they are — have been known for some time. As deforestation in the Amazon accelerates, however, more of these earthworks are coming to light. With them comes increased certainty that past Amazonian peoples carried out intensive agriculture and lived in large-scale geo-polities.
These facts have crashed up against my stubbornly implanted, but false, mental images of pre-Columbian Amazonia: huge swaths of emerald and unbroken forest teeming with monkeys, jaguars, birds, and insects — but housing only a few, small, scattered groups of human hunter-gatherers.
—Barbara J King
Oddly enough, I used to work in this area on archeological digs in these sites where dark earths were found. The underestimation of pre-Colombian Amazonian populations has been a long-argued point in those that study the area. There are miles and miles of areas along the Amazon, Rio Negro and Rio Tapajos that used to be settlements and are now densely littered with millions of pot shards from these villages and cities. In the area we excavated you couldn’t walk anywhere without stepping on pieces of pottery that were hundreds of years old.
