"Pre-Columbian Towns In Amazon Basin!" Topic
14 Posts
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Cacique Caribe | 07 Mar 2007 2:37 p.m. PST |
This may be old news to some. Just in case . . . "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." Rest of article here: link CC |
Grinning Norm | 07 Mar 2007 2:43 p.m. PST |
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Cacique Caribe | 07 Mar 2007 2:52 p.m. PST |
I think they also used to condition the soil to some extent, producing what Brazilian locals today call "terra preta": link link This is also interesting from the BBC: PROF WILLIAM WOODS (Southern Illinois University): It's, it's somewhat difficult to see, but near the top of this low bluff along the Tapajos we have very dark soil. This is just a very good example of what covers tens of thousands of hectares in the local region. NARRATOR: This black soil, or terra preta as the Brazilians call it, is dotted all over the Amazon jungle, but what intrigued archaeologists is what it contains. JAMES PETERSEN: You'll see all kinds of things scattered over the ground here. Many of them look like rocks or stones, but in fact they're all artefacts, mostly pottery sherds, busted up jars made by the Indians one to two thousand years ago. It's a, it's a, it's a very dense concentration, rather remarkable in all senses. After just a minute or two I was able to pick up several handfuls of really dramatic pottery sherds. if we can imagine what the whole jars would look like we'd be rather surprised by these fine works of art. NARRATOR: The pottery they have found is exquisite and much of it dates from the time of Christ, long before the coming of the Europeans. It was the first hard proof that there had once been an advanced culture in the heart of the rainforest and when they dug down into the terra preta scientists made the most revealing discovery of all. Not only was the black soil full of pottery, but it was almost exactly the same composition as the yellow jungle soil around it, except it had been mixed with organic waste. That meant the terra preta had to be man-made. DR EDUARDO NEVES (University of Sã';o Paulo): We know that, that this terra preta here formed with the soil, so they look very different and they are very different in a way, but that's the matrix for that. We have to have human action interfering in the yellow soil in order to create the terra preta. NARRATOR: It was the key revelation. It meant that wherever you find terra preta there people had once lived, so scientists have started mapping the black soil and wherever Orellana reported seeing settlements there they have found it. All along the banks of the Amazon, up the Rio Negro and down the Tapajos they are finding the terra preta. In all, a massive area, twice the size of Britain. JAMES PETERSEN: Some have estimated perhaps that as much as 10% of Amazonia's covered with this Amazonian dark earth or terra preta. Its widespread distribution if linked to culture, which the vast majority of contemporary scientists believe, suggests that native cultures are not only widespread but in some cases phenomenally numerous. NARRATOR: But to convince everyone that there really had been a large prehistoric population in the Central Amazon the archaeologists still had to explain how these people had achieved what we cannot. How had they fed themselves on the poor Amazonian soil? The answer again seems to lie in the terra preta. link CC |
Cacique Caribe | 07 Mar 2007 3:04 p.m. PST |
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Dan Cyr | 07 Mar 2007 3:05 p.m. PST |
Read "1491" for a decent read about this. Dan |
chicklewis | 07 Mar 2007 3:23 p.m. PST |
So, what happened to all of these thousands and thousands of pre-European farmers in the Amazon basin ?? What chased (or killed) them off? |
Sterling Moose | 07 Mar 2007 4:22 p.m. PST |
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zippyfusenet | 07 Mar 2007 4:40 p.m. PST |
chicklewis: So, what happened to all of these thousands and thousands of pre-European farmers in the Amazon basin ?? What chased (or killed) them off? Disease mostly, with survivors being missionized and absorbed into Luso-Brazilian culture. John Hemming Red Gold covers the depopulation of Brazilian Amazonia pretty thoroughly. |
Carlos Marighela | 07 Mar 2007 5:10 p.m. PST |
And of course Xingu Preto is a magnificent beer, based on Indian brewing traditions. hmmmmmmmm beer |
chicklewis | 07 Mar 2007 6:58 p.m. PST |
Thanks, Zippy, sounds like something I must read. Chick |
vojvoda | 07 Mar 2007 8:21 p.m. PST |
Global warming! Have you not been following the threads
. VR James Mattes In fact most "native" American societies died out as a result of problems with their environments caused by man. But do not tell the CA boards that
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Cacique Caribe | 08 Mar 2007 7:10 a.m. PST |
These articles have some sketches of what those "cities" in the Amazon may have looked like: link msnbc.msn.com/id/3077413 Aren't there even a couple of expeditions currently trying to find pyramids/temples in the middle of the Amazon jungle? I can't think of the city or site they are after, but there's no telling what may be discovered in the South American jungles in years to come. CC |
crhkrebs | 08 Mar 2007 12:03 p.m. PST |
"Read "1491" for a decent read about this." Yes the book goes into the battles between Betty Meggers and Anna Roosevelt on what happened. My feel is the same as James Mattes, the move to swidden agriculture depleted the land of it's nutrients. Another native eco-disaster, not exactly a politically correct viewpoint. Ralph |
Cacique Caribe | 09 Mar 2007 6:32 a.m. PST |
Now, I'm confused. I was always taught that the root of all evil done to the Earth, with the exception of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Chaco Canyon and very few others, was the result of Europeans! :) "Scientists have found one possible answer by looking at tree rings (a study called dendrochronology) in the Sand Canyon area. In the period between A.D. 1125 and 1180, very little rain fell in the region. After 1180, rainfall briefly returned to normal. From 1270 to 1274 there was another long drought, followed by another period of normal rainfall. In 1275, yet another drought began. This one lasted 14 years." link "From at least AD 1000 to 1680, Rapa Nui's population increased significantly. Some estimate the population reached a high of 9,000 by 1550. Moai carving and transport were in full swing from 1400 to 1600, just 122 years before first contact with European visitors to the island. In those 122 years, Rapa Nui underwent radical change. Core sampling from the island has revealed a slice of Rapa Nui history that speaks of deforestation, soil depletion, and erosion. From this devastating ecological scenario it is not hard to imagine the resulting overpopulation, food shortages, and ultimate collapse of Rapa Nui society. Evidence of cannibalism at that time is present on the island, though very scant. Van Tilburg cautiously asserts, "The archaeological evidence for cannibalism is present on a few sites." link In both cases, the end result was a collapse that even included widespread cannibalism (a politically incorrect conclusion when it comes to the Chaco Anasazi, depite the evidence): "But another, deeper mystery lies just a dozen or so miles west of Mesa Verde, in an area known as Cowboy Wash, a broad, flat floodplain in the shadow of Sleeping Ute Mountain. A century and a half before the abandonment of Mesa Verde, Cowboy Wash was home to another group of people, probably Anasazi as well. Recently, archeologists discovered several piles of human bones at the site. These bones, they say, show clear evidence of cannibalism. What's more, they maintain that this find does not represent an isolated incident. In the last few years, at least 30 nearby digs have yielded similar evidence of humans eating humans. Some archeologists speculate, naturally, that only people forced to desperate measures by starvation in this harsh environment would resort to cannibalism. The excavators of Cowboy Wash, however, propose a new theory. The cannibalism that occurred there, they say, was an act of prehistoric terrorism." "Evidence of trauma was not hard to find. Most of the bones were broken, and many looked scraped and scorched. The marks looked like those left on the bones of large game animals after butchering. According to many archeologists, the presence of such marks on human bones is a clear indication of cannibalism. Someone who is planning to eat a human body part, the theory goes, would naturally prepare it in the same manner as he would an elk or a deer. And that is exactly what Lambert found. 'I found cut marks at muscle attachment sites, such as where the femur is attached to the hipbone,' she says. 'It's pretty clear they were disarticulating the body, cutting tendons and soft tissues that connect various parts.' The cut marks occur when cutting tools slip and strike bone instead of tissue, she explains, and they cannot be mistaken for the gnawing marks an animal might leave. The relatively pristine condition of the bones is yet another clue; If the flesh had been left to rot away rather than being deliberately removed, says Lambert, the bones would be discolored and pitted instead of white, smooth, and dense. And some bones look as through they were broken open so the nutritious marrow could be extracted. They bear the complex fractures that occur in living bone -- not the simple, smooth fractures of decaying bone. Moreover, they show flake scars, the marks that are left when a hammering tool chips bone. Perhaps most disturbing was the evidence of burning and cooking -- even a mere summation of it, 850 years after the fact, is enough to make one queasy: some bones appear to have been browned by heat exposure when they were still covered with flesh, and the skulls of both children in Feature 13 were obviously burned. 'The burning clearly happened while the head was intact,' says Lambert. 'The back of the cranial vault was down around the coals, and the flames licked up and browned the side and blackened the back. Sometime later the head was taken apart -- we found the pieces in two separate piles. They were putting the head on the fire. They were not incinerating it, but they did put it on there long enough to have cooked the brains. 'I can't say that they were eating these people, but they were certainly processing them in a way that suggests they were,' says Lambert." link So, maybe they just ate eachother in the Amazon as well. That would be sufficient incentive for the survivors to run back to the jungle. Or, maybe just maybe, they were actually wiped out by brain-eating zombies! CC PS. 'I can't say that they were eating these people, but they were certainly processing them in a way that suggests they were,' – weird how these words almost sound like fear of sounding politically incorrect. |
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