Hat tip to Bill Adkins for this great find.
The gradual devastation of the Amazon—the felling of thousands of square miles of forest, the clear-cutting of the jungle—has produced, paradoxically, one of the greatest archeological discoveries: a vast and complex ancient civilization. In cleared-away areas of the upper Amazon basin, researchers, using satellite imagery, have recently pinpointed a vast network of monumental earthworks, including geometrically aligned roads and structures, constructed by a hitherto unknown civilization. According to a new report published in the journal Antiquity, the archeologist Martii Pärssinen and other scientists have documented more than two hundred and ten geometric structures, some of which may date as far back as the third century A.D. They are spread out over an area that spans more than two hundred and fifty kilometers, reaching all the way from northern Bolivia to the state of Amazonia in Brazil.
eople assumed that the Amazon was a primeval wilderness, a place in which there were, as Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature, “no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death.” Although the early conquistadores had heard from the Indians about a fabulously rich Amazonian civilization, which they named El Dorado, the searches for it invariably ended in disaster. Thousands were wiped out by disease and starvation. And after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most scholars concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion.
The latest discovery proves that we are only at the outset of this archeological revolution—one that is exploding our perceptions about what the Amazon and the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
What is striking about the structures is that their monumentality and sophisticated design are best seen from an aerial view, where they look like an elaborate geometry equation diagrammed in the earth. Pärssinen and the team of scientists estimate that the population at these sites may have been as large as sixty thousand people, and what’s more that the sites found so far represent a fraction of what exists—”only ten percent of what is actually there.” The disappearance of this still mysterious civilization correlates with the arrival of the conquistadores in the Amazon and the spread of diseases. Alas, the discovery of this glorious civilization is due to another tragedy—the vanishing of the once great jungles its people inhabited. [New Yorker]
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