Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest

[lildreamer316]

Originally posted by Adsos Letter in GD:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7221458

Source: New Scientist
by Linda Geddes

Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.

"It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. "Every week we find new structures." Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.

Garden villages
Their discovery, in an area of northern Bolivia and western Brazil, follows other recent reports of vast sprawls of interconnected villages known as "garden cities" in north central Brazil, dating from around AD 1400. But the structures unearthed at the garden city sites are not as consistently similar or geometric as the geoglyphs, Schaan says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427383.800-ancient-amazon-civilisation-laid-bare-by-felled-forest.html

(I repost stuff like this because I feel it pertains to some discussions we have here,and I know some of our group does not venture out to GD very often - hate for you to miss it! :) )

[winyanstaz]

1. I love stuff like this :) thanks for the link

[MorningGlow]

2. Talk about all things coming to light...

This story, and the one (in the Science forum?) about how now archaeologists think the Mayans didn't farm themselves out of existence as was previously believed...so much still to learn!

[kentauros]

3. The sad part about all of this is the loss of the forests

in order to find some archeological relics. What's even worse is that vegetation is not a barrier to things like side-scan radar, something the earliest Shuttle flights proved. We could have had orbital satellites scanning the entirety of the planet for archeological remains without ever digging up the ground.