Archaeologists discover 81 ancient settlements in the Amazon - The Washington Post - 0 views
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amazon americas settlement agriculture history
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in a paper published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, de Souza and his colleagues describe the mound village and 80 other newly discovered archaeological sites from the years 1250 to 1500.
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They predict that the region hides hundreds more undiscovered sites, and that as many as a million people might have carefully managed the rain forest long before Europeans arrived.
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Fifty years ago, she said, “prominent scholars thought that little of cultural significance had ever happened in a tropical forest. It was supposed to be too highly vegetated, too moist. And the corollary to those views was that people never cut down the forests; they were supposed to have been sort of ‘noble savages,’ ” she said. “But those views have been overturned,” Piperno continued. “A lot of importance happened in tropical forests, including agricultural origins.”
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De Souza and his collaborators spent a month conducting on-the-ground surveys of 24 of those sites. All of them contained evidence that they had been inhabited: abandoned stone tools and broken ceramics, buried trash heaps, an enriched soil called terra preta that is characteristic of indigenous land management through burning and adding fertilizer. By measuring how much of samples’ radioactive carbon had decayed over the years, the researchers dated wood charcoal found at the sites to the early and mid-1400s.
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Others’ research shows that entire regions of the rain forest are dominated by tree species once cultivated for food by indigenous people. And highly planned networks of villages have been identified on either side of the region de Souza studied.
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The latest discovery, de Souza said, suggests there was a continuous string of settlements across the entire southern rim of the Amazon basin.
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“It seems that it was a mosaic of cultures,” he continued. The villages shared some practices — enriching the soil, cultivating Brazil nut and cocoa trees, encircling their homes with protective ditches — but spoke a diverse array of languages
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“The forest is an artifact of modification,” de Souza said. He quickly added: “It has nothing to do with the kind of practice we are seeing nowadays — large-scale, clearing monoculture. These people were combining small-scale agriculture with management of useful tree species. So it was more a sustainable kind of land use.”