Uncovered: an urban Amazon - August 29, 2008
The image of an ancient, unspoiled Amazon rainforest might have to be revised after researchers claimed that tracts of it were urbanised well before Colombus sailed the ocean blue (in 1492).
The ‘Amazon rainforest was giant garden city’, says the Telegraph while the BBC hails the discovery of ‘lost towns’ (not strictly accurate as they were first described in 2003). As Scientific American’s headline notes alliteratively: ‘Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized’.
In this week’s issue of Science researchers from the US and Brazil report their findings on the societies that already existed at the time Europeans arrived in the New World. Many areas previously considered virgin forest have actually been influenced by human activity, says author Mike Heckenberger, of the University of Florida (press release).
Heckenberger previously announced rediscovering these settlements in 2003. They date to around the time Europeans arrived, and likely killed off the residents one way or another, and were then overgrown.
“These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns,” he says.
“The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that ‘if you find it in Europe, it’s a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else’.”
In their latest paper Heckenberger and colleagues report on how they mapped these lost settlements via satellite images and with the assisstance of the local Xinguano tribe who helped them find signs of past farming, pottery and earthworks. They found extensive networks of walled towns and villages all surrounded by earth walls.
Over on Wired though, Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, isn’t quite convinced: “What is urban? I’d certainly want to see things a little more dense than things are here to call them urban. Still, he’s got lots of settlements. It doesn’t matter how you look at them, he’s got a lot of them.”
If you can read Portuguese or are willing to brave the vagaries of online translators there is an interesting take on this work in the Brazilian G1 news website.
Image: an excavation block in the Amazon / © Science/AAAS
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Here is my translation of the Portuguese from G1: Archeologists discover large urban areas in the prehistoric Amazon
Group finds 'cities' 700 years old enclosed by walls and ditches.
Communities recall medieval settlements or those of Ancient Greece. (by Reinaldo Jose Lopes, in Sao Paulo)
You must get out of your head the old idea that the Amazon before Columbus (actually Pedro Alvares Cabral, the great Portuguese explorer who discovered South America on April 23, 1500) was a great voic, a mountain of "brush" with 2 or 3 indigenous tribes wandering about here or there. That view of the land has gone on for some time and has just collided with a new one in a scientific article published on the 6th of this month.
American & Brazilian researchers have studied the region of the Alto Xingu in Mato Grosso and have found indications of a network of urban settlements defended by walls and irrigation ditches, joined by wide roads and organized around ritual centers that recall those that are still used by the Indians of the area. Stretches of the Xingu that today appear to be virgin forest still contain, in truth, the scars of lost 'cities' from 700 years ago, claim the scientists in the study, in the American journal "Science."
The quotation marks around the word 'cities' are necessary because, as it seems, the ancestors of the Kuikoro Indians and other peoples of the Alto Xingu didn't use space in the traditional urban manner, packing a great quantity of houses in a single place. Instead of a group of skyscrapers, its settlements were more of a closed condominium with a vast green area. They combined a succession of villages, joined by roads (the bigger ones up to 50 meters wide) with stretches that are interspersed with fields of manioc, managed forests, and virgin rainforest.
"The problem is that if you find this type of thing in Europe, it is a city. If you find this in another place, it has to be something else," explained an official notice by Michael Heckenberger, the archaeologist, coordinator of the research, who works at the University of Florida at Gainesville. "They had incredible planning and organization, more than many classic examples of what people call urbanism," Heckenberger says. The archaeologist worked in the Xingu with specialists such as anthropologists Carlos Fausto and Bruna Franchetto of the National Museum of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and with Afukaka Kuikuro, of the Kuikuro tribe, as the study also indicates.
Apart from the controversy about terminology, what is certain is that, for the researchers, the pre-Cabral urban communities of the Mato Grosso were more or less the same size as the average city of Ancient Greece (Sparta, for example, was relatively modest in size) or of the Middle Ages (Coimbra at the time when the kingdom of Portugal was established, let us say). Ancient communities such as these 'cities' of the Xingu were organized around a central square, of about 150 meters in length, and served for meetings and activities of a religious or ritual nature.
Posted by: Diana Gainer | September 9, 2008 11:32 PM