Long Before Making Enigmatic Earthworks, People Reshaped Brazil's Rain Forest - The New... - 0 views
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Deep in the Amazon, the rain forest once covered ancient secrets. Spread across hundreds of thousands of acres are massive, geometric earthworks. The carvings stretch out in circles and squares that can be as big as a city block, with trenches up to 12 yards wide and 13 feet deep. They appear to have been built up to 2,000 years ago.
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“A lot of people have the idea that the Amazon forests are pristine forests, never touched by humans, and that’s obviously not the case.”
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Dr. Watling and her team reconstructed a 6,000-year-old environmental history of two geoglyph sites in the Amazon rain forest. To do this, they searched for clues in soil samples in and around the sites. Microscopic plant fossils called phytoliths told them about ancient vegetation. Bits of charcoal revealed evidence of burnings. And a kind of carbon dating gave them a sense of how open the vegetation had been in the past.
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About 4,000 years ago, people started burning the forest, which was mostly bamboo, just enough to make small openings. They may have planted maize or squash, weeded out some underbrush, and transported seeds or saplings to create a partly curated forest of useful tree products that Dr. Watling calls a “prehistoric supermarket.” After that, they started building the geoglyphs. The presence of just a few artifacts, and the layout of the earthworks, suggest they weren’t used as ancient villages or for military defenses. They were likely built for rituals, some archaeologists suspect.
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in contrast with the large-scale deforestation we see today — which threatens about 20 percent of the largest rain forest in the world — ancient indigenous people of the Amazon practiced something more akin to what we now call agroforestry. They restricted burns to site locations and maintained the surrounding landscape, creating small, temporary clearings in the bamboo and promoting the growth of plants like palm, cedar and Brazil nut that were, and still are, useful commodities. Today, indigenous groups around the world continue these sustainable practices in forests.