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Amazon rainforest was transformed over 2,000 years ago by mysterious earthworks
- momentmaker 10y agoAliens
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- JoeAltmaier 10y agoSports fields?
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- yread 10y ago> The structures are ditched enclosures that occupy roughly 13,000 km2 So, they have a radius of 65km ?! How did they make the picture then? Can't be right EDIT: why should a reader care what is the total space occupied by 450 ditched enclosures?
- sp332 10y agoMaybe it's a total. Or maybe the 450 circles are different sizes and they photographed a smaller one.
- hanoz 10y agoThe area which they occupy, not enclose, is 13,000 km2.
- randallsquared 10y ago> why should a reader care what is the total space occupied by 450 ditched enclosures? Sense of scale.
- pbhjpbhj 10y agoI'd say it gives a sense of the type of occupation of the land it is, city vs. village vs. local farmsteads, and thus an idea of the type of land use and cooperation that might have taken place?
- cossatot 10y agoAmazonian earthworks such as these are discussed quite a bit in Charles Mann's 1491, mostly in the context of dual hypotheses that the Amazon (and much of N. and S. America) was both far more heavily populated, and far more ecologically managed, than previously thought. It's a great and fascinating book, although not as data rich and scholarly as it could be. I don't recall Mann having much description of what the earthworks were used for, although there were suggestions of some of them being fish corrals during high water events, I believe.
- bandrami 10y agoDang, somebody beat me to 1491. He also suggested some of them were causeways for transportation.
- mirimir 10y agoThanks! Yes, "both far more heavily populated, and far more ecologically managed", and for a far longer time. Perhaps for as long as 40 kiloyears. But relatively isolated, with just "low-bandwidth" communication with northeast Asia. I wonder why things went so differently in Eurasia. Maybe bronze and iron technology? Jared Diamond stuff?
- kneath 10y agoHe does go into this a bit. Due to the ecology in the Amazon (a giant mud-filled floodplain), tools and buildings tended to be made of organic materials like wood & fiber rather than rock & metal as was more common in other areas of the world. As such, much of the evidence of these people would have rotted away by the time we started looking. Organic materials rot away real quick in a warm, wet climate.
- mirimir 10y agoOK, right. So ecology and terrain are the only records. Do we have any idea when populations crashed? Could it have been smallpox etc epidemics from European explorers? Edit: Yes, Mann does indeed argue that. And also that isolation prevented tech spreading. I must read that book!
- Neliquat 10y agoStrongly reminds me of primitive animal pens/trapping yards. Used in the ancient middle east to trap wandering animals.
- alisson 10y agoI would guess it is to hold/route rain water, like a swale.
- 23443463453 10y agoGot to love academic news and information that is usually totally void of visuals and data. So you found earthworks that transformed the Amazon. How about sharing some of those pictures in a little more than one that is 50x50px.
- joshuaheard 10y agoThese remind me of the circular homesteads I saw when flying over Africa. These homesteads were made of huts with a yard circled by a fence for protection and penning the domestic animals. In a rain forest, it would make sense to dig a small drainage pit around the whole yard, and for added protection like a moat.
- arethuza 10y agoI guess that's just the natural shape for a small fort - circular to enclose as much area with the least wall and ditch/wall because you need to dig the earth to build/reinforce your wall from somewhere and a ditch adds to the effectiveness of your wall? They look very like the ancient settlements/enclosures that you get all over the UK - there are loads of them here in Scotland.
- irrational 10y agoExcept they mention that there are few to no artifacts found in them, thus indicating that they weren't used as settlements/enclosures.
- gus_massa 10y agoIANAA. I remember that it's very difficult to find ancient tools near China, because they probably used bamboo to build them. In other places, the people used stones that are more archeological friendly. So it's possible to find the tools and even the shard of stones discarded while building the tools. Is it possible that they can't find the tools here because they were made with some king of wood?
- sulam 10y agoTools might rot, but in general you'd expect to at least find middens, skeletal remains, teeth, scorched layers indicating a hearth of some sort, etc. There's non-tool markers for communities that will survive even in the rain forest.
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- jcoffland 10y agoI would guess that these were used to contain game.
- source99 10y agoNeed to get the team that analyzed Cambodia using LIDAR to analyze Brazil.
- glenneroo 10y agoIs it too much to ask NASA/ESA to launch a constellation of CubeSATs with LIDAR? Alternately let Google do it and add it as an overlay to Google Maps.
- sdld 10y agoi thought Amazon Rainforest (R) was some kind of a new platform..
- pgkl 10y agoI had the exact same thought when I read the first two words
- danielsiders 10y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_City_of_Z_(book)
- e40 10y agoThat is an excellent book. I read almost exclusively Sci Fi, but I found this book enthralling. Highly recommended.
- contingencies 10y agoNice meme: #prehistoricsupermarket Reminds me of the Terence McKenna quote: The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic. But when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality - people don't seem to notice - this is a virtual reality. These are all ideas - ideas that have been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to be human.
- ZenoArrow 10y agoI had expected the article would mention terra preta: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_preta