Day 1066: The ancient Amazon
Feb. 19th, 2023 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeI watched a fascinating episode of Nova today. “Everyone knows” that the Amazon rainforest doesn’t support agriculture, so the people living there have always been hunter-gatherers.
Not so. The fossil evidence shows that the ancient Amazonians domesticated or semi-domesticated at least 80 plant species and learned to make rich soil from composting a particular mix of substances together. Of course, they couldn’t have fields of grain monocultures like the people did in the Middle East. They also couldn’t store food because there was too much moisture everywhere all the time, so they didn’t develop large cities and empires, and thus they don’t fit our conventional pattern of civilization. Instead, they developed settled communities that better fit their environments. Lidar technology shows that beneath all those trees lie the ruins of their ancient buildings. At the center of each community there was a pyramid and other special buildings, and then at distances from that central grouping were clusters of other buildings, in a nodal network structure, with roads between them. I assume that meant that each node had its own food supply conveniently surrounding it.
Also, in Peru, at the very edge of the Amazon tributary system, they’ve excavated a mound not unlike other mounds around the world that turned out to have ancient structures beneath them. This one turned out to have a 50’ tall pyramid beneath it, and the top of the pyramid was mostly flat, with a stone spiral built on it, leading to a depressed area in the very center where someone special had been buried. And this pyramid was 5000 years old, older than the pyramids of Egypt!
Many of the archaeologists working on uncovering these Amazon buildings and artifacts are indigenous, hoping their work can establish their rights to their ancestral lands. The 5000-year-old pyramid excavation began in 2010, though, which is quite recent, so there’s still a lot to learn, and I imagine they’re still in the early days of publicizing what they’ve found, too.
Not so. The fossil evidence shows that the ancient Amazonians domesticated or semi-domesticated at least 80 plant species and learned to make rich soil from composting a particular mix of substances together. Of course, they couldn’t have fields of grain monocultures like the people did in the Middle East. They also couldn’t store food because there was too much moisture everywhere all the time, so they didn’t develop large cities and empires, and thus they don’t fit our conventional pattern of civilization. Instead, they developed settled communities that better fit their environments. Lidar technology shows that beneath all those trees lie the ruins of their ancient buildings. At the center of each community there was a pyramid and other special buildings, and then at distances from that central grouping were clusters of other buildings, in a nodal network structure, with roads between them. I assume that meant that each node had its own food supply conveniently surrounding it.
Also, in Peru, at the very edge of the Amazon tributary system, they’ve excavated a mound not unlike other mounds around the world that turned out to have ancient structures beneath them. This one turned out to have a 50’ tall pyramid beneath it, and the top of the pyramid was mostly flat, with a stone spiral built on it, leading to a depressed area in the very center where someone special had been buried. And this pyramid was 5000 years old, older than the pyramids of Egypt!
Many of the archaeologists working on uncovering these Amazon buildings and artifacts are indigenous, hoping their work can establish their rights to their ancestral lands. The 5000-year-old pyramid excavation began in 2010, though, which is quite recent, so there’s still a lot to learn, and I imagine they’re still in the early days of publicizing what they’ve found, too.
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Date: 2023-02-21 01:17 am (UTC)no subject
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