Aug 3, 2026 02:53 PM
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/world...=url-share
EXCERPTS: Flying over the southwestern Amazon, archaeologists have discovered hundreds of ancient, monumental designs carved in the earth that hint at complex societies in the rainforest a millennium before Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived.
The research, published this week in the journal Nature, shows circles, squares and other geometric figures, some with connecting roads, beneath the forest canopy, with nearly 400 previously unknown earthworks in all. Many are formations that archaeologists call geoglyphs and date from between 600 B.C. to 850 A.D. All of them add to evidence contradicting the depiction of the Amazon as a largely untouched expanse before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century.
[...] The geoglyphs, shaped by embankments, mounds and trenches, vary in size. Most span seven acres, including many with ditches 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The biggest figure sprawls across more than 120 acres. [...] Dr. Pärssinen said the archaeologists had not found any evidence of permanent residence at the mounds from the Aquiry era, which ended around 900 A.D. Nor did they believe any were meant to be defensive structures.
But the structures, stretching across a zone of 1,700 square miles, build on evidence that the Amazon basin was widely and densely populated in the centuries before Columbus. Chroniclers like Gaspar de Carvajal, a missionary who traveled the Amazon in the 1540s with the conquistador Francisco de Orellana, described a land “thickly populated” in some places, with many large settlements, including one that “stretched for five leagues without there intervening any space from house to house.”
Those accounts were largely dismissed in the centuries that followed, given the crushing toll that disease and colonization took on Indigenous people. Scientists who followed also struggled to see how large or complex societies could develop without European-style agriculture, contributing to a false idea that the Amazon was a pristine forest, rather than one where the population was almost wiped out.
“Archaeologists find all of these things that are not supposed to be found in Amazonia, and it’s not because Amazonia is different in terms of the soil but how you use the forest,” Dr. Roosevelt said.
Recent work in other parts of the Amazon has found the traces of roads, canals, plazas and residential platforms, including in eastern Ecuador. Dr. Pärssinen’s team estimated that there may be thousands more earthworks in the region, and noted that the rainforest remains so dense in some places that even lasers could not pierce the foliage... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/AsIvMt2xbNo
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/AsIvMt2xbNo
EXCERPTS: Flying over the southwestern Amazon, archaeologists have discovered hundreds of ancient, monumental designs carved in the earth that hint at complex societies in the rainforest a millennium before Spanish and Portuguese colonists arrived.
The research, published this week in the journal Nature, shows circles, squares and other geometric figures, some with connecting roads, beneath the forest canopy, with nearly 400 previously unknown earthworks in all. Many are formations that archaeologists call geoglyphs and date from between 600 B.C. to 850 A.D. All of them add to evidence contradicting the depiction of the Amazon as a largely untouched expanse before the arrival of Europeans in the 15th century.
[...] The geoglyphs, shaped by embankments, mounds and trenches, vary in size. Most span seven acres, including many with ditches 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The biggest figure sprawls across more than 120 acres. [...] Dr. Pärssinen said the archaeologists had not found any evidence of permanent residence at the mounds from the Aquiry era, which ended around 900 A.D. Nor did they believe any were meant to be defensive structures.
But the structures, stretching across a zone of 1,700 square miles, build on evidence that the Amazon basin was widely and densely populated in the centuries before Columbus. Chroniclers like Gaspar de Carvajal, a missionary who traveled the Amazon in the 1540s with the conquistador Francisco de Orellana, described a land “thickly populated” in some places, with many large settlements, including one that “stretched for five leagues without there intervening any space from house to house.”
Those accounts were largely dismissed in the centuries that followed, given the crushing toll that disease and colonization took on Indigenous people. Scientists who followed also struggled to see how large or complex societies could develop without European-style agriculture, contributing to a false idea that the Amazon was a pristine forest, rather than one where the population was almost wiped out.
“Archaeologists find all of these things that are not supposed to be found in Amazonia, and it’s not because Amazonia is different in terms of the soil but how you use the forest,” Dr. Roosevelt said.
Recent work in other parts of the Amazon has found the traces of roads, canals, plazas and residential platforms, including in eastern Ecuador. Dr. Pärssinen’s team estimated that there may be thousands more earthworks in the region, and noted that the rainforest remains so dense in some places that even lasers could not pierce the foliage... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/AsIvMt2xbNo