Atlantis Online
March 29, 2024, 10:17:53 am
Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
News: 'Europe's oldest city' found in Cadiz
http://mathaba.net/rss/?x=566660
 
  Home Help Arcade Gallery Links Staff List Calendar Login Register  

"Pristine" Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization - UPDATES

Pages: [1] 2   Go Down
  Print  
Author Topic: "Pristine" Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization - UPDATES  (Read 2491 times)
0 Members and 57 Guests are viewing this topic.
Bianca
Superhero Member
******
Posts: 41646



« on: May 12, 2009, 09:26:30 am »










"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."
Report Spam   Logged

Your mind understands what you have been taught; your heart what is true.


Pages: [1] 2   Go Up
  Print  
 
Jump to:  

Powered by EzPortal
Bookmark this site! | Upgrade This Forum
SMF For Free - Create your own Forum
Powered by SMF | SMF © 2016, Simple Machines
Privacy Policy