Amazon hides an ancient urban landscape
11:22 29 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic
Amazon
Larger towns and villages were surrounded by a ditch, such as this one which is being excavated (Image: Science/AAAS)Advertisement
It could be a case of history repeating itself in the jungles of South America. Huge swathes of the Western Amazon were cleared 600 years ago, though back then it wasn't for logging, it was to make way for an urban network of towns, villages and hamlets.
For the past few decades archaeologists have been uncovering urban remains that date back to the 13th century – long before European settlers had sailed across the Atlantic and discovered the "New World".
This means that decent chunks – some 20,000 square kilometres – of the Western Amazon forest is not, strictly speaking, what could be called "virgin" forest. It is what took over after local cultures were wiped out by European settlers and imported diseases and their towns and villages were left untended.
"In 1993, I went to live with the Kuikuro people," says Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida. "After a few days, the village chief, Afukaka Kuikuro, took me out to the remains of an earthen wall."
Heckenberger soon realised that the structures which the Kuikuro held to be associated with their gods were, in fact, the remains of their ancestors' cities. He now returns to the area every year with a team of Brazilian and US colleagues to trace the extent of the pre-European settlements with a GPS transmitter in hand.
Town planning
What has emerged from this work is a digital map of two complex and dense urban clusters, right in the heart of the jungle. The clusters are connected by roads and each has a distinct central element. In one case this is a ceremonial plaza; in the other a residential plaza.
The next largest residential centres are 3 to 5 kilometres to the south-east and north-west of each centre; slightly smaller centres are between 8 km and 10 km from the centres, to the south-west and north-east.
Each of these "towns" had its own central plaza and was protected by an earthen wall. They were surrounded by smaller, non-walled residential hamlets.
The towns, villages and hamlets were interlinked by roads, the largest of which followed the direction of the sun at the mid-year solstice.
Return of the forest
Although the team have looked at the detail of just two of these urban clusters, they have found evidence of another 13, covering a total area of more than 20,000 square kilometres – equivalent to the size of New Jersey or Wales.
The researchers estimate the population of each village and town would have been between 250 and 2500, and all 15 clusters could have been home to more than 50,000 people.
What happened to these towns? Some modern Kuikuro villages still stand on original sites, and in these villages the primary, or high-ranking, houses lie south-east and north-west of the central plaza – a similar pattern to the ancient orientation.
It is likely that when European colonisers arrived in South America in the early 16th century, the indigenous population was decimated and urban clusters were abandoned.
Unlike ancient Andean civilisations, the Kuikuro and other indigenous peoples from the Amazon had little stone close at hand. They built with earth and, once they were gone, the forest reclaimed the land, leaving little trace of the once considerable urbanisation.
Altered landscape
The findings raise big questions, says Susanna Hecht of the University of California in Los Angeles.
For starters, it forces a rethink of the long-held assumption that these parts of the Amazon were virtually empty before colonisation. What's more, it shows that the large populations that did inhabit the region transformed the landscape.
"What we find is that what we think of as the primitive Amazon forest is not so primitive after all," Heckenberger told New Scientist. "European colonialism wasted huge numbers of native peoples and cleared them off the land, so that the forest returned."
What, then, did the primitive Amazon look like? That is a mystery, says Heckenberger. It is clear, though, that these large urban clusters reordered the entire landscape.
Research published in January revealed that was has long been thought of as the "original" New England landscape was in fact created by British settlers in the 17th century.
Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1159769)
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Weblinks
Michael Heckenberger, University of Florida
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/mheckenb/
Susanna Hecht, University of California, LA
Hecht
NS blog: Tribes use GPS and Google Earth in conservation effort
Tribes
) but it looks pretty decent and well rounded - not just pretty pictures.
