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Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network

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« on: August 30, 2008, 01:42:53 am »

Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network

John Roach
for National Geographic News
August 28, 2008


Dozens of ancient, densely packed, towns, villages, and hamlets arranged in an organized pattern have been mapped in the Brazilian Amazon, anthropologists announced today.

The finding suggests that vast swathes of "pristine" rain forest may actually have been sophisticated urban landscapes prior to the arrival of European colonists.

"It is very different from what we might expect using certain classic models of urbanism," noted study co-author Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Nevertheless, he said, the repeated patterns within and among settlements across the landscape suggest a highly ordered and planned society on par with any medieval European town.

The finding supports a controversial theory that the Amazon River Basin teemed with large societies that were all but obliterated by disease when European colonists arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The isolated tribes that remain in the Amazon today are the last survivors of these once great societies, according to the theory.

(Related story: "'Uncontacted' Amazon Tribe Actually Known for Decades" [June 19, 2008])

If this theory is correct, the networked structure of the ancient settlements may lend insight to better protect and manage the indigenous populations and forests that remain in the Amazon today, scientists said.

Heckenberger and his colleagues from the U.S. and Brazil—including a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian tribe—report their finding today in the journal Science.

Urban Plan

In 1993, Heckenberger lived with the Kuikuro near the headwaters of the Xingu River. Within two weeks of his stay, he learned about the ancient settlements and began a 15-year effort to study and map them in detail.

So far he has identified at least two major clusters—or polities—of towns, villages, and hamlets. Each cluster contains a central seat of ritualistic power with wide roads radiating out to other communities.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080828-amazon-cities.html?source=rss





Lines mapped from village earthworks radiate outward from the central power seat in the southernmost of two recently identified clusters of ancient Amazon towns.

Dozens of densely packed, pre-Columbian towns, villages, and hamlets arranged in an organized pattern have been mapped in the Brazilian Amazon, anthropologists announced in late August 2008.

Map courtesy Science/AAAS

Each settlement is organized around a central plaza and linked to others via precisely placed roads. In their heyday, some of the settlements were home to perhaps thousands of people and were about 150 acres (61 hectares) in size.

A major road aligned with the summer solstice intersects each central plaza.


The larger towns, placed at cardinal points from the central seat of power, were walled much like a medieval town, noted Heckenberger. Smaller villages and hamlets were less well defined.

Between the settlements, which today are almost completely overgrown, was a patchwork of agricultural fields for crops such as manioc along with dams and ponds likely used for fish farms.

"The whole landscape is almost like a latticework, the way it is gridded off," Heckenberger said. "The individual centers themselves are much less constructed. It is more patterned at the regional level."

At their height between A.D. 1250 and 1650, the clusters may have housed around 50,000 people, the scientists noted.

According to Heckenberger, the planned structure of these settlements is indicative of the regional planning and political organization that are hallmarks of urban society.

"These are far more planned at the regional level than your average medieval town," he said, noting that rural landscapes in medieval settlements were randomly oriented.

"Here things are oriented at the same angles and distances across the entire landscape."

"Garden Cities"

The research "raises huge and important questions," Susan Hecht, an Amazon specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, was quoted saying in a related Science news piece written by Charles Mann.

Mann is the author of the 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which describes theories of urban planning in the Amazon.

For one, Hecht was quoted as saying, the research adds further weight to the idea that the Amazon Basin once supported large and complex societies.

Other scientists, notably archaeologist Betty Meggers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., have argued that Amazonian soils were too poor to support large human populations for extended periods.

Hecht said the research also challenges the idea that urbanism means a central, dominant, and powerful city. Smaller, but highly connected settlements may also have been common.

According to study co-author Heckenberger, the clusters of towns in the pre-Columbian Amazon were similar to the system envisioned by British planner Ebenezer Howard in his 1902 book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow.

Howard argued for a system of tightly linked smaller cities instead of large megacities that are an eyesore on the natural world.

"If [he] knew about Xingu, it would have been a chapter in his book," Heckenberger said.

And now that the Amazonian "garden cities" have been found, Heckenberger added, scientists and planners ought to study them closely for alternatives to the modern system that is destroying vast reaches of the Amazon and displacing the last of the region's indigenous tribes.

"We know that we have to come up with alternatives," he said, "so here is a place we may want to look."


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Dara Meloy
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« Reply #1 on: August 30, 2008, 10:06:20 pm »

Amazon hides an ancient urban landscape
11:22 29 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic

 It could be a case of history repeating itself in the jungles of South America. Huge swathes of the Western Amazon were cleared 600 years ago, though back then it wasn't for logging, it was to make way for an urban network of towns, villages and hamlets.

For the past few decades archaeologists have been uncovering urban remains that date back to the 13th century – long before European settlers had sailed across the Atlantic and discovered the "New World".

This means that decent chunks – some 20,000 square kilometres – of the Western Amazon forest is not, strictly speaking, what could be called "virgin" forest. It is what took over after local cultures were wiped out by European settlers and imported diseases and their towns and villages were left untended.

"In 1993, I went to live with the Kuikuro people," says Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida. "After a few days, the village chief, Afukaka Kuikuro, took me out to the remains of an earthen wall."

Heckenberger soon realised that the structures which the Kuikuro held to be associated with their gods were, in fact, the remains of their ancestors' cities. He now returns to the area every year with a team of Brazilian and US colleagues to trace the extent of the pre-European settlements with a GPS transmitter in hand.

Town planning
What has emerged from this work is a digital map of two complex and dense urban clusters, right in the heart of the jungle. The clusters are connected by roads and each has a distinct central element. In one case this is a ceremonial plaza; in the other a residential plaza.

The next largest residential centres are 3 to 5 kilometres to the south-east and north-west of each centre; slightly smaller centres are between 8 km and 10 km from the centres, to the south-west and north-east.

Each of these "towns" had its own central plaza and was protected by an earthen wall. They were surrounded by smaller, non-walled residential hamlets.

The towns, villages and hamlets were interlinked by roads, the largest of which followed the direction of the sun at the mid-year solstice.

Return of the forest
Although the team have looked at the detail of just two of these urban clusters, they have found evidence of another 13, covering a total area of more than 20,000 square kilometres – equivalent to the size of New Jersey or Wales.

The researchers estimate the population of each village and town would have been between 250 and 2500, and all 15 clusters could have been home to more than 50,000 people.

What happened to these towns? Some modern Kuikuro villages still stand on original sites, and in these villages the primary, or high-ranking, houses lie south-east and north-west of the central plaza – a similar pattern to the ancient orientation.

It is likely that when European colonisers arrived in South America in the early 16th century, the indigenous population was decimated and urban clusters were abandoned.

Unlike ancient Andean civilisations, the Kuikuro and other indigenous peoples from the Amazon had little stone close at hand. They built with earth and, once they were gone, the forest reclaimed the land, leaving little trace of the once considerable urbanisation.

Altered landscape
The findings raise big questions, says Susanna Hecht of the University of California in Los Angeles.

For starters, it forces a rethink of the long-held assumption that these parts of the Amazon were virtually empty before colonisation. What's more, it shows that the large populations that did inhabit the region transformed the landscape.

"What we find is that what we think of as the primitive Amazon forest is not so primitive after all," Heckenberger told New Scientist. "European colonialism wasted huge numbers of native peoples and cleared them off the land, so that the forest returned."

What, then, did the primitive Amazon look like? That is a mystery, says Heckenberger. It is clear, though, that these large urban clusters reordered the entire landscape.

Research published in January revealed that was has long been thought of as the "original" New England landscape was in fact created by British settlers in the 17th century.

Journal reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1159769)

http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn14624-amazon-hides-an-ancient-urban-landscape.html?DCMP=ILC-hmts&nsref=news2_head_dn14624
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« Reply #2 on: August 30, 2008, 10:08:48 pm »



Larger towns and villages were surrounded by a ditch, such as this one which is being excavated (Image: Science/AAAS)
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