for National Geographic News
Far from being a pristine wilderness prior to Columbus's arrival in the New World, parts of the Brazilian Amazon more closely resembled a pre- historic version of urban sprawl.
Michael J. Heckenberger and colleagues have identified at least 19 settlements dating from A.D. 1250 to 1600 in the Xingu region of Brazil's Amazon forest. Connected by a complex set of interlinking roads, the villages were defined by ditches, curbs, moats, open parklands, and working forests. The researchers estimate that some clusters of six to 12 villages may have been home to as many as 2,500 to 5,000 people.
"The idea that people lived in small, dispersed, autonomous villages, moving around and living in a delicate balance with nature is just a fantasy," said Heckenberger, an archaeologist at the University of Florida. "Five hundred years ago Amazonian society was comparable with developments in North America, Africa, Asia, much of temperate Europe in 1492, in terms of scale and sociocultural innovation."
"The region supported a fairly dense, settled population," he said. "The Xinguano people built their villages according to a very clear plan, at a very large scale, and all of them are interconnected with one another. The sophistication of the layout bespeaks a knowledge of mathematics, architecture, astronomy, and engineering."
The study is published in the September 19 issue of the journal Science.
Looking at a Regional System
Heckenberger and colleagues mapped all of the sites within a 15 mile by 15 mile square (24 by 24 kilometers) in order to understand the study area as a regional system.
Dating from roughly 400 to 750 years ago, the 19 villages are approximately two to three miles (three to five kilometers) apart, connected by straight roads that have curbs and are as much as 165 feet (50 meters) wide in some places. Each village has a central circular plaza. Ditches up to 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometers) long and 16 feet (5 meters) deep surround the villages.
Other structures include bridges, constructed ponds, canals, and raised causeways. To support such a dense population, farmers converted surrounding forest to grow manioc, fruit orchards, and large fields of grasses for thatched houses.
"What's really exciting are all these roads that radiate out of plazas, showing there must have been a lot of social interaction," said Clark Erickson, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and the University Museum. "These were large towns, maybe even small cities, being found in what is really pretty much the hinterlands of the Amazon. It's really quite spectacular in an area we didn't think could support that kind of population."
The sheer size of the earthwork structures is part of a cultural aesthetic that held a symbolic and social importance, rather than economic functionality, said Heckenberger.
"They build big things. We have a tendency to think of Amazonians engaged in an ongoing struggle with nature, and that everything they do is based on economic need or value," he said. "But these people overcame that and it stimulated quite phenomenal cultural and social elaborations of the environment. The socio-cultural complexity is significantly more than what we expected, and shows the Amerindians were amazingly sophisticated cultural innovators."
SOURCES AND RELATED WEB SITES