Science Alert reports on the discovery of a long-gone urban sprawl hidden underneath the “untouched” Amazon rain forest:
Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape.
Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was even larger than archaeologists imagined, hinting at a people that built as many as 30,000 earthworks and had a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE.
For archaeo-anthropologist Martti Pärssinen of the University of Helsinki, the realization was transformative.
“I first experienced such a moment in 2002, when I flew with Alceu Ranzi and Sanna Saunaluoma over the monumental geometric earthworks and observed ancient roads connecting the sites in the state of Acre, Brazil, a region that had long been regarded as pristine rainforest,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert.
“It completely transformed my understanding and made me realize how mistaken earlier assumptions had been.
“More recently, I felt something similar when I came to understand that there may actually be up to ten times more of these earthworks in the region than I had previously imagined.”
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The researchers surveyed 4,497 square kilometers (1,736 square miles) of rainforest by flying a series of long, roughly 450-kilometer (280-mile) transects over the region.
Their entire dataset yielded 432 earthworks – 396 of which were previously unknown.
“What surprised us most was the extraordinarily large number of geoglyphs and other earthworks found within an area representing less than 3 percent of Greater Amazonia,” Pärssinen said.
“The scale of the archaeological record suggests that many other regions across Amazonia may have been far more densely populated and intensively modified than previously assumed.”
By extrapolating their results, combined with existing surveys, the researchers estimated that, at its peak, the Aquiry civilization may have covered an area as large as 183,000 square kilometers.
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It would have been a dramatically different place than the wilderness we see today – a forest threaded with clearings where people lived, farmed, celebrated, and gathered.
“At the center of many of these clearings would stand large geometric earthworks connected by broad and narrow roads,” Pärssinen told ScienceAlert when asked what the landscape might have looked like around 200 CE.