Sophisticated civilization found in Ancient Amazon jungle

'Pristine' Amazon Hosted Large Cities, Study Finds
Thu Sep 18, 2:02 PM ET
By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -  Brazil's northern Amazon region, once thought to
have been pristine until modern development began encroaching, actually
hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years
ago, researchers said on Thursday.
 Archeological evidence and satellite images show the area was densely
settled long before Columbus and European settlers arrived, with towns
featuring plazas, roads up to 150 feet wide, deep moats and bridges, the
researchers found.
The report, published in the journal Science, suggests a society that
was advanced and complex, and that found alternative ways to use the
Amazon forest without destroying it.
Nineteen evenly spaced villages were linked by straight roads, and the
cluster could have supported between 2,500 and 5,000 people, said the
researchers, led by Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida.
The villages were all laid out in a similar manner -- and the roads were
mathematically parallel. "This really blew us away," Heckenberger said
in a telephone interview. "It's fantastic stuff."
Heckenberger, who worked with indigenous chiefs from the Upper Xingu
region as well as a team at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro,
said the settlements dated to between 1200 A.D. and 1600 A.D.
"Every 3 km to 5 km (mile and a half to two miles) there is another
village or town," he said. "Some of these villages are 50 hectares in
size ... maybe 150 or so acres in total size," he added.
WIDE BOULEVARDS
"In the villages sometimes the roads are 50 meters wide. Why 50 meters?
There were no wheeled vehicles. They were not having car races up and
down these things and certainly you were not moving Incan armies."
Heckenberger believes the wide boulevards and plazas were the early
Xinguano society's version of monuments -- akin to the pyramids of the
Maya.
"Clearly it is an aesthetic thing," he said. "It speaks of very
sophisticated astronomical knowledge and mathematical knowledge and the
kind of things that we associate with pyramids. It is a different human
alternative to social complexity."
It would have taken a productive economy to fund such works, he added.
But the civilization was not as large and urbanized as better known
South American civilizations.
"Everyone loves the 'lost civilization in the Amazon story'. What the
Upper Xingu and middle Amazon stuff shows us is that Amazon people
organized in an alternative way to urbanization. We shouldn't be
expecting to find lost cities. But that doesn't mean they were primitive
tribes, either."
The agriculture was clearly sophisticated, too, the researchers said,
and probably very unlike modern clear-cutting strategies. They clearly,
however, altered the forest, Heckenberger said.
"What it does show is there are alternatives to what is commonly
presented as an all-or-nothing scenario," he said.
The Amazon was not primordial when European colonists arrived --
bringing with them the diseases such as smallpox and measles that
virtually wiped out indigenous populations.
"I firmly believe that the majority of what is now forested landscape
would have been converted into some other type of environment --
secondary forest or fields of grass or orchards of fruit trees or manioc
gardens," he said.
Xinguano people still live in the region and are certainly descended
from whoever built the cities, he said -- but the populations are
considerably sparser.

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