- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Brazil's
northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until modern
development began encroaching, actually hosted sophisticated networks of
towns and villages hundreds of years ago, researchers said on Thursday.
-
- Archeological evidence and satellite images show the
area was densely settled long before Columbus and European settlers arrived,
with towns featuring plazas, roads up to 150 feet wide, deep moats and
bridges, the researchers found.
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- The report, published in the journal Science, suggests
a society that was advanced and complex, and that found alternative ways
to use the Amazon forest without destroying it.
-
- Nineteen evenly spaced villages were linked by straight
roads, and the cluster could have supported between 2,500 and 5,000 people,
said the researchers, led by Michael Heckenberger of the University of
Florida.
-
- The villages were all laid out in a similar manner --
and the roads were mathematically parallel. "This really blew us away,"
Heckenberger said in a telephone interview. "It's fantastic stuff."
-
- Heckenberger, who worked with indigenous chiefs from
the Upper Xingu region as well as a team at the Universidade Federal do
Rio de Janeiro, said the settlements dated to between 1200 A.D. and 1600
A.D.
-
- "Every 3 km to 5 km (mile and a half to two miles)
there is another village or town," he said. "Some of these villages
are 50 hectares in size ... maybe 150 or so acres in total size,"
he added.
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- WIDE BOULEVARDS
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- "In the villages sometimes the roads are 50 meters
wide. Why 50 meters? There were no wheeled vehicles. They were not having
car races up and down these things and certainly you were not moving Incan
armies."
-
- Heckenberger believes the wide boulevards and plazas
were the early Xinguano society's version of monuments -- akin to the pyramids
of the Maya.
-
- "Clearly it is an aesthetic thing," he said.
"It speaks of very sophisticated astronomical knowledge and mathematical
knowledge and the kind of things that we associate with pyramids. It is
a different human alternative to social complexity."
-
- It would have taken a productive economy to fund such
works, he added. But the civilization was not as large and urbanized as
better known South American civilizations.
-
- "Everyone loves the 'lost civilization in the Amazon
story'. What the Upper Xingu and middle Amazon stuff shows us is that Amazon
people organized in an alternative way to urbanization. We shouldn't be
expecting to find lost cities. But that doesn't mean they were primitive
tribes, either."
-
- The agriculture was clearly sophisticated, too, the researchers
said, and probably very unlike modern clear-cutting strategies. They clearly,
however, altered the forest, Heckenberger said.
-
- "What it does show is there are alternatives to
what is commonly presented as an all-or-nothing scenario," he said.
-
- The Amazon was not primordial when European colonists
arrived -- bringing with them the diseases such as smallpox and measles
that virtually wiped out indigenous populations.
-
- "I firmly believe that the majority of what is now
forested landscape would have been converted into some other type of environment
-- secondary forest or fields of grass or orchards of fruit trees or manioc
gardens," he said.
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- Xinguano people still live in the region and are certainly
descended from whoever built the cities, he said -- but the populations
are considerably sparser.
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