America before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization
By Graham Hancock
13
BLACK EARTH
IT SEEMS TO ME TO be no longer in doubt that civilizations with true cities and
mature polities did flourish in the Amazon before the European conquest.
Less clear is how far back the story of these civilizations can be traced in this
immense region where so little archaeology has been done.
Thanks to Anna Roosevelt’s work we know, at the very least, that humans
were present at Pedra Pintada at the Tapajoz/Amazon confluence by about
14,000 years ago and possibly significantly earlier.1
With other more
accessible painted rock shelters in Brazil dating back as much as 50,000
years, it is, I suspect, only a matter of time before evidence of at least equally
great if not greater antiquity emerges from the Amazon itself.
But greater antiquity of what? Was it foragers and hunter-gatherers all the
way back? Or was some advanced but unseen presence capable of spanning
the globe at work behind the scenes of prehistory that might help to explain
how Australasian genes reached the Amazon during the Ice Age? Again, the
problem is complicated by the fact that few archaeologists other than
Roosevelt have looked for evidence of humans in the Amazon at all at such a
remote period, so we have very little to go on across thousands of years
during which the data are sketchy and inconclusive.
But then out of that opaque interlude in the life of the prehistoric Amazon,
quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the lineaments of a great mystery begin to
materialize. It concerns the “exemplary agronomy” that UCLA’s Professor
David Wilkinson cites as his two-word explanation for how the cities of the rainforest were able to feed their large populations—because rainforests in
general do not have good base soils but sustain their fertility in the mulch of
plants and leaves above ground.2
This is why, when areas of the Amazon are
cleared for agriculture today—for example, to make way for soybean
plantations—they become exhausted, infertile, and useless after only a few
years.3
But Wilkinson is not speaking of the base soils. His “exemplary
agronomy,” as we shall see, refers to an artificial, man-made soil that first
suddenly and inexplicably appeared in the Amazon many thousands of years
ago but that has such miraculous properties of self-regeneration that it is still
in use for agriculture and still incredibly productive today.
It is called Terra preta. More than any other single factor, it is now
understood by scholars to have been responsible for the astonishing and
utterly anomalous agricultural productivity that allowed a population
estimated at between 8 and 20 million people 4
to thrive for untold epochs in
the Amazon before being overtaken by the cataclysm of the European
conquest.
Terra preta feels like the work of scientists, but if there was a civilization
in the Amazon, then why should we be surprised to find scientific
achievements to its credit?
THE MYSTERY
THE EXISTENCE OF TERRA PRETA was first reported by Europeans in colonial period Brazil who called it terra preta de Índio (Indian Black Earth), “the
reference to ‘Indians’ reflecting the presence of abundant pottery shards of
evident pre-Columbian age on the surface of most known exemplars.”5
Today these special soils, described by one nineteenth-century explorer as
consisting of “a fine, dark loam, a foot, and often two feet thick,”6
are more
often spoken of as “Black Earth,” “Amazonian Anthropogenic Dark Earths,”7
or simply as “Amazonian Dark Earths”—ADEs for short.8
Whatever we call them though, what are they, and why do they matter?
We’ve seen how, across immense areas, the natural terra firme (non-floodplain) soils of the Amazon are too poor to sustain intensive agriculture
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and thus to feed the large-scale populations that we now know inhabited the
region in pre-Columbian times:
With few available nutrients and having extremely high aluminum concentrations,
one could not imagine a worse regime for productive agriculture.9
Indeed, the consensus of scholars is that even the floodplains with their
better soils are high-risk areas for crop production “because of the
unpredictability of the flood regime.”10
But, and it’s a big but, what are we to make of those early explorers’
reports of dense settlements extending for kilometers along river bluff edges
whence roadways branched out into the interior?
The remnants of some of these settlements are now being investigated by
twenty-first-century researchers, no longer blinded by the prejudices of the
past, who often refer to them as “garden cities” of the Amazon.11 Invariably it
turns out that they are associated, as one authoritative study puts it, with large
acreages of “‘Indian black earth’ or terra preta. The heightened fertility
status of these soils, generically termed ‘dark earths …’ has long been
recognized by the indigenous inhabitants of the region, as well as by current
colonists.”
12
Across the rainforest there are many thousands of expanses of terra preta
on a similar range of scales, covering a total area that is in all honesty
unknown but that various authorities have guesstimated at 6,000 km2
, 18,000
km2
, 154,063 km2
, and “an area the size of France” (i.e., around 640,000
km2
).13 Whatever the true figure, these widely scattered plots of ADE—the
rediscovered remnants of a once much more extensive system—are indeed
actively sought out and productively cultivated by indigenous people to this
day.
In the southeastern Amazon along the Xingu River, to give just one
example, a recent study found that existing settlements, though on a much
smaller scale than in the past, are still able to survive largely because of the
accomplishments of their ancestors who had “continuously occupied,
managed and modified” the soils over thousands of years. Almost without
exception the riverine people of the Xingu today “inhabit and plant in dark
earths,” and make use of resources, such as “Brazil nuts, babassu palm, dark
earths and vine forests” that are “indicators or products of this earlier occupation.” Indeed, as Stephen Schwartzman, the research team leader,
maintains, “Contemporary land use and resource management in the Xingu
corridor is … significantly conditioned or made possible by mostly little studied prehistoric land-use practices.”14
Particularly little studied and poorly understood are the practices that
resulted in the so far unexplained inception in the Amazon, a very long time
ago, of the incredibly fertile ADEs themselves. Nobody doubts that they are
“anthropogenic”—man-made in some way 15—and everyone agrees that
they’re an amazing success story. So fecund is terra preta, even after
thousands of years of use, that it can still regenerate barren soils it is added
to, and has been described as “miracle earth.”16
The important questions therefore, are how was terra preta made, why was
it made, when was it made, and who made it?
Part of the answer to the first question is often dug up by villagers along
the Xingu River. In (and characteristic of) the patches of ancient terra preta
where they plant their crops they “regularly encounter potsherds, stone axes,
ceramics and figurines.”17
Such “refuse” left behind by people of the remote past, seems to play an
important role in the amazing fertility of the ADEs—but then so do all the
other strangely jumbled and juxtaposed ingredients that typically also include
compost, the feces and urine of humans and animals, and all sorts of organic
“kitchen” waste, including bones, notably fish bones.
Most researchers believe that terra preta soils formed as composted
material accumulated via incidental human activity (often in debris piles
referred to as middens).18
University of São Paulo archaeologist Eduardo Neves reportedly favors a
scenario in which successive generations could have swept food refuse—
especially fish and animal bones—from their dwellings and then added
human and animal excrement.19
Elsewhere, in a paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Science
in February 2014, Neves, Michael Heckenberger, and others develop this idea
further. Their argument depicts the ancient Amazonians as living amid a
shitscape (euphemistically referred to as a “middenscape”),20 dumping their
excretions, rubbish, broken crockery, and fish bones into the middens and—
most importantly—burning wet vegetation on top of the middens, and always
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conscientiously making sure, without any long-term planning or purpose in
mind, to keep the fires damped down under a blanket of dirt and straw.21
This method of cool-burning, explains Tom Miles, an expert in the
combustion and gasification of biomass,22 is known as “slash-and-char”—to
distinguish it from the widely condemned “slash-and-burn”:
In slash-and-burn, dry brush and grass are burned in open fires, spewing vast
quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and leaving only small amounts
of nutrients in the ash that’s then dug into the ground.
By contrast, slash-and-char involves burning wet vegetation, so it smulders underneath a layer of dirt and straw. Robbed of oxygen, the fire only partly burns
any wood or stalks, leaving most as tiny chunks of charcoal. This bio-char is
turned into the soil.23
In due course—entirely incidentally and accidentally according to most
proponents of such views—these stinking, smouldering middens spread and
alchemically transformed themselves into ADE, “the world’s most fertile
soil,”24 without any deliberate human intervention at all.
I’d say it’s an unlikely story!
I can’t prove it but my bet is that terra preta is not an accidental by-product
of shit, fish bones, broken pots, figurines, stone ax heads, and low temperature fires. Just because it contains all those things doesn’t inevitably
make it fortuitous. I think the evidence supports another possibility—that this
remarkable soil was invented, making excellent use of freely available local
resources, as an ingenious, low-tech, and environmentally friendly way to
increase agricultural yield in areas that would otherwise not have been able to
sustain agriculture, and thus large populations, even for a few decades, let
alone for several thousands of years—as the Amazonian Dark Earths have
consistently demonstrated a “miraculous” ability to do.
“What has been mysterious about these soils,” Professor Antoinette
WinklerPrins, director for environmental studies at Johns Hopkins
University, admits, “is their ability to persist in a landscape that common
ecological knowledge would dictate they could not.25… Why then have
ADE’s dated to have formed up to 2500 years ago, continued to exist?”26
It is not just a matter of 2,500 years ago—as we shall see, the origin of the
Amazonian Dark Earths goes back much farther than that—but here’s how
Dr. WinklerPrins answers her own question:
The unique nature of the carbon in these soils is the key to the stability of the
organic matter in ADE’s and the key to the mystery of the persistence of ADE’s in
this landscape.27
There appears—exceptionally—to be universal agreement among
scientists on one point. This is that the explanation for all the useful qualities
of terra preta “lies in large part with the char (or biochar) that gives the soil
its darkness” and that is produced, as Tom Miles explained, by the
smouldering (rather than hot burning) of organic matter in an oxygen-poor
environment. The results are not properly understood, but, according to
Nature, “The particles of char produced this way are somehow able to gather
up nutrients and water that might otherwise be washed down below the reach
of roots.”28
William Balée, professor of anthropology at Tulane University, confirms
these observations, adding that “microbial activity leads to increased carbon
sequestration,” and that “ADE is richer and more diverse in microbes than
surrounding soils, even though millions of these species remain to be
identified precisely, and literally a million separate taxa can be contained in
only 10 grams of soil. A significant proportion of the microbes in ADE are
different from microbes in the surrounding primeval soils.”29
Another authoritative study also focused on the surprising microbial vigor
and utility for agricultural purposes of ADEs, noting a further connection
with the managed use of fire. “Fire contributes charcoal and ash, which
increase soil pH, thereby suppressing aluminum activity toxic to plant roots
and soil microbiota.”30
What is more, fire increases the capacity of the soils to retain nutrients,
thus maintaining a “synergistic cycle of continued fertility.”31
In summary, concedes Professor WinklerPrins, the microbial complexes
associated with ADEs are “poorly understood” and “quite mysterious
actually.”32 Likewise, even the authors of the shitscape/middenscape theory
of ADE formation admit that “despite the importance of research on terra
preta, we still lack a firm understanding of the specific formation processes
that led to the diversity inherent in these anthrosols.”33
Yet all this mystery, all this effectiveness, all this efficiency, and all these
remarkable contributions to welfare, we are asked to believe, came about as incidental by-products of human activity? They just happened—without any
planning, or deliberation, or design at all?
I could see immediately why such ideas would give comfort to
archaeologists whose roller-coaster ride thus far has taken them from a
position where they had convinced themselves and their students that there
could never have been any cities in the Amazon, to a position where they
must now accept that the prehistoric rainforest once teemed with cities. This
in itself has been a traumatic enough paradigm shift. I’m therefore not
surprised that most archaeologists remain unwilling to go the extra mile
needed to view terra preta—that “miraculous” agent of fertility—as the
product of deliberate, ingenious, organized, focused, scientific activity. It
causes far less cognitive dissonance, for so naturally conservative and
cautious a discipline, to conclude instead that it was the waste and refuse of
those previously contested Amazonian cities with their very large populations
that had accidentally fertilized the land and made possible the otherwise
anomalous boost to agricultural productivity that had kept the stomachs of the
otherwise anomalous urban populations full.
But isn’t it much more likely that all this happened the other way around?
Surely it makes no sense that the large populations came first. If they did,
how did they feed themselves while enough shit and fish bones were being
accumulated to create the first patches of terra preta? Isn’t it more logical that
the settlement and expansion of human populations in the Amazon was a
planned affair in which the spread of terra preta was a precondition for the
development of large settlements rather than a consequence of it?
Professor Balée, not an archaeologist, seems to be thinking somewhat
along these lines when he cites the bizarre microbial differences between
ADE's and the original, unenhanced soils that surround them as evidence for a
deliberate human “contribution to microbial diversity in the Amazon, a
remarkably intriguing and still living, even evolving legacy of the preColumbian Dark Earth people.”34
REMARKABLE AND PRECOCIOUS SCIENCE
AS WITH SO MUCH ELSE that concerns the Amazon, the issue of when, exactly,
terra preta first began to be created continues to be fogged by confusion and
uncertainty.
A casual glance through the scientific literature might leave the reader with
the impression that these exceptionally fertile anthropogenic soils are a
phenomenon of the past 3,000 years only—with the great bulk of terra preta
creation taking place between about 1,000 years ago and the time of the
European conquest.
35
Look closer, however, and you will discover that many of the same
authorities are tiptoeing around the edges of another mystery here.
For example, while reemphasizing their satisfaction with the idea that
Amazonian Dark Earths are “produced by human habitation but
unintentionally,”
36 and noting that ADE formation “ceased in most, if not all,
parts of Amazonia during the early Contact period,” Eduardo Neves and his
colleagues concede that “the initiation of ADE formation has been more
difficult to explain so far.”
37
They choose to focus on the period from around 2,500 to 2,000 years ago
but caution that earlier sites may have disappeared due to the dynamic
landscape processes of the Amazon, or perhaps because “the soil organic
matter in most older ADE sites has been mineralized, leaving only inorganic
artifacts behind, without coloration of the substrate by organic matter, and
thus, early sites are under-represented.”
38
But by no means all of the earlier sites have disappeared. Enough of the
older plots remain for several of the leading authorities to agree that 2,500
years ago is nowhere near the beginning of the story. Neves himself accepts
the existence of much older ADE sites, notably “the sites of the so-called
Massangana phase … dated ca. 4,800 BP.”
39
These sites, which are about 300 years older than the orthodox date for the
construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza, are located in southeast Amazonia
in the Jamari River area. Unfortunately, they are no longer accessible, having
been flooded by the construction of the Samuel hydroelectric dam.
40
It
seems, however, that there are even older ADEs. In the Proceedings of the
Royal Society, for example, Neves and others report Black Earths that are
between 5,000 and 6,000 years old.
41 Elsewhere—in no less august a journal
than Nature—we read of ADEs that “are thought to be 7000 years old.”
42
Nor does the trail leading back to humanity’s time of amnesia quite fade
from view even there. Specialists from Cornell University’s Department of
Crop and Soil Sciences, joined by Eduardo Neves and citing his “unpublished
data,” conclude in the Journal of the Soil Science Society of America that the
man-made Dark Earths of the Amazon in fact date back as far as 8,700 years
ago.43
And again, Neves’s own caution must surely apply—that even older sites
than this may very well once have existed but have disappeared with the
passage of time.
Given the incredible longevity of this soil and its extraordinary ability to
regenerate its own fertility through microbial action, it is by no means beyond
the bounds of reason to suppose that plots of terra preta dating back to the last
Ice Age might still exist somewhere in the millions of square kilometers of
the rainforest that have never been investigated by archaeologists at all.44
What is certain, however, is that a remarkable and precocious skill and
competence in soil science—“exemplary agronomy” in Professor David
Wilkinson’s phrase—leaves its fingerprints in the Amazon at least 8,700
years ago. After that (and for how long before that we do not know) its use
becomes integrated into the harmonious and successful lifeways of ancient
Amazonian civilization. This civilization thrives for millennia, long
outlasting ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, doing very well for itself
and for its people in just about every possible way, until the catastrophe of
European contact that not only subjects it to genocide by sword and by
epidemic, but also conspires to deny its very existence for centuries
thereafter.
Reader, please note—when I speak of an “ancient Amazonian civilization”
I am not under any circumstances claiming that this was the lost civilization I
have spent much of my working life trying to track down! My suggestion,
rather, is that, in weighing what happened in the Amazon from the Ice Age
until the European conquest, we may find that certain striking anomalies such
as the mysterious Australasian genetic signal, and indeed the Amazonian
Dark Earths themselves, bear the fingerprints of that world-exploring, world encompassing, world-measuring lost civilization of prehistoric antiquity.
More specifically, the proposition we are presently considering in this context
is that the settlement and expansion of human populations in the Amazon was
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a planned affair in which the spread of terra preta was a precondition for the
development of large population centers rather than a consequence of it.
It was, in other words, not something random at all but an integral part of a
carefully thought-out project.
14
GARDENING EDEN
FURTHER INTRIGUING HINTS THAT SOME sort of intelligent, guided project was
mounted in the Amazon thousands of years ago are to be found in recent
studies of the species of trees that populate the rainforest. These studies
demonstrate that far from being a “pristine” natural environment, the Amazon
is largely a human creation.
Anna Roosevelt, whose sometimes radical views we’ve already
encountered, criticizes other scientists for assuming—all too often—that the
Amazon’s forests are entirely works of nature “without conducting research
to exclude a human influence.”1
When that research is done, it turns out that while “Amazonian forests in
different regions differ significantly from one another in topography, climate,
geology, hydrology, structure, seasonality, and history,” they nonetheless
“often resemble each other” in showing a “pattern of unexpected dominance
and density of a small group of plant species. This pattern has been found
wherever Amazon forests have been inventoried and has yet to be explained
by natural factors.”2
The best current estimate is that the Amazon is presently home to about
16,000 woody tree species. Out of this total, however, “only 227
hyperdominant species dominate Amazonian forests.”3
These so-called
oligarchs (from the Greek for “rule by a few”) “make up only 1.4% of all the
Amazon forest species but almost half of the trees in any given forest.”4
In 2017 a large international team of ecologists and archaeologists, led by
environmental science researcher Carolina Levis of Wageningen University
in the Netherlands, completed a study looking into this peculiar pattern of
distribution. What immediately stood out in their data was that, among the
oligarchs, “domesticated species are five times more likely than
non-domesticated species to be hyperdominant.”5
Moreover, in almost every case where clusters of hyperdominants were
inventoried, ancient archaeological sites were found among them 6—a
correlation so frequent and reliable that the presence and concentration of
oligarchs could, in theory, be used to “predict the occurrence of
archaeological sites in Amazonian forests.”7
The team’s detailed analysis, published in Science, therefore concludes that
“modern tree communities in Amazonia are structured to an important extent
by a long history of plant domestication by Amazonian peoples. … Detecting
the widespread effect of ancient societies in modern forests … strongly
refutes ideas of Amazonian forests being untouched by man. Domestication
shapes Amazonian forests.”8
We’ve seen that the question of exactly when human beings first arrived in
the Amazon remains to be settled. So, too, does the question of exactly when
they began to domesticate trees. The team’s results suggest that “past human
interventions had an important and lasting role in the distribution of
domesticated species found in modern forests, despite the fact that the
location of many archaeological sites is unknown.”9
On present evidence,
however, adds Levis, all that can be said with certainty is that at some point
“more than 8,000 years ago,” Amazonian people were already focusing
attention on certain trees that were particularly useful to them.
They really cultivated and planted these species in their home gardens, in the
forests they were managing.10
Among the favored species mentioned in the Science paper, now all
hyperdominant, are Bertholletia excelsa (the Brazil nut tree), Inga edulis
(“Ice-Cream Bean,” a fruit tree), Pourouma cecropiifolia (“Amazon Grape,”
a fruit tree), Pouteria caimito (the abiu, a fruit tree), and Theobroma cacao
(the cocoa tree—chocolate).11
Other prized Amazonian species domesticated in ancient times include the
açai palm and tucuma palm, the peach palm, the Cupuaçu tree, the cashew
tree, and the rubber tree.12
A MAJOR CENTER OF
CROP DOMESTICATION
AS I RESEARCHED THIS MATERIAL I was initially surprised to learn that cocoa
trees and rubber trees, both of which I’d wrongly believed were indigenous to
and had been domesticated in Mexico, were in fact originally South
American species and had been domesticated in the Amazon. I was equally
surprised to learn that capsicum—chili peppers, red and green bell peppers, et
cetera—which I had again wrongly thought were Mexican in origin, had
likewise first been domesticated in the Amazon.13
Indeed, though often overlooked, Amazonia has rightly been described as
“a major center of crop domestication” on a global scale.14 Prior to the
European conquest, according to Charles R. Clement of Brazil’s National
Institute of Amazonian Research, “at least 83 native species were
domesticated to some degree, including manioc, sweet potato, cacao,
tobacco, pineapple and hot peppers, as well as numerous fruit trees and
palms, and at least another 55 imported neotropical species were
cultivated.”15
Pineapples! There was another surprise for me, as I had (again wrongly)
always assumed that these tropical fruits grow on trees and had their origins
in some Pacific archipelago, perhaps Hawaii. In fact, the pineapple plant with
its long, spiky leaves, is not a tree. It grows close to the ground (with each
plant producing a single pineapple), belongs to the Bromeliad family, and is
indigenous to, and was first domesticated in, the Amazon rainforest.16
There is no firm information on when domestication was undertaken, but
in Charles Clements’s view, “The widespread distribution of the pineapple in
the Americas at the time of the European conquest, the diversity and quality
of the cultivars, not surpassed after one century of modern, intensive
breeding, the diversity of uses, the economic and cultural importance of the
crop, all point to a very ancient domestication.”17
Out of the 83 crops native to Amazonia and the 55 “exotic” ones, a total of
138 crops in all, Clements and his colleagues classify 52, including the
pineapple, as fully domesticated. Of these, 14 (27 percent) are fruit or nut
trees or woody vines. Among the 41 crops classified as semi-domesticated,
35 (or 87 percent) are fruit or nut trees or woody vines. Among the 45 crops
classified as incipiently domesticated, all but 1 are fruit or nut trees:18
Overall, 68% of these Amazonian crops are trees or woody perennials. In
landscapes largely characterized by forest, a predominance of tree crops is perhaps
not surprising. Nonetheless, the most important subsistence crop domesticated in
Amazonia is an herbaceous shrub, manioc, and several other domesticates are also
root or tuber crops, most of which are adapted to savanna-forest transitional
ecotones with pronounced dry seasons.19
Think of it. The rainforest was coaxed, shaped, and transformed by what
can only be described as scientific practices into a vast garden of useful and
productive trees. But trees alone cannot feed large populations, so the
prehistoric domestication program was extended on a massive scale to
include agricultural species that were then successfully incorporated, through
the use of terra preta, into the Amazonian ecology.
THE MANIOC CONUNDRUM
MANIOC, THE KEY STAPLE, “THE most important food crop that originated in
Amazonia,”20 and on which the majority of the population of the Amazon
still depend today,21 is of particular interest for a number of reasons.
Molecular analysis has confirmed that this woody shrub, cultivated for its
edible roots, was domesticated in the Amazon basin, “most likely in the
savannas, the Brazilian Cerrado, to the south of the Amazon rainforest,”22
and more specifically “in northern Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Acre states, in
Brazil, and adjacent areas of northern Bolivia. Domestication must have
started before 8,000 BP, as that is the earliest date reported from the Zana and
Ñanchoc valleys of coastal Peru.”23
Unlike the Amazon itself, large parts of which remain inaccessible to
archaeologists, these two coastal Peruvian valleys have been well studied,
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yielding, as well as manioc, “evidence for radiocarbon-dated human
cultivation of squash (9240 and 7660 yr B.P.), peanut (7840 yr B.P.), quinoa
(8000 and 7500 yr B.P.), and cotton (5490 yr B.P.).”24
What is notable, however, is that all of these crops had already been
domesticated elsewhere before being grown in coastal Peru.25
As with cocoa and chilies, I’d long been under the impression that the
squash plant (cucurbita) was first domesticated in Mexico around 10,000
years ago, and indeed there is archaeological evidence to support this.26 But
now here it was turning up in Peruvian coastal valleys 9,240 years ago, and
not only there but at similar dates in the nearby sites of Paiján and Las
Pircas.27 An authoritative study published in Science suggests that these
cultivated Peruvian squash plants may have been from a line that had
originally been domesticated not in Mexico but in “southwestern Ecuador
and the Colombian Amazon” as early as 10,000 to 9,300 years ago.28
What about the peanuts cultivated in the Zana and Ñanchoc valleys 7,840
years ago? They, too, it turns out, were domesticated east of the Andes in a
region extending south from the southern edge of the Amazon basin.29 This is
broadly the same region in which manioc was also domesticated,30 and in
both cases we can only go on the dates of the earliest surviving materials—
currently put at around 8000 years BP31—to guess when domestication in
fact took place. Certainly it was before 8,000 years ago, but how long before
is a matter largely of conjecture and some authorities are already seeking to
push the horizon back to at least 9,000 and perhaps 10,000 years ago.32
Manioc, also known as cassava, is a starchy crop, a good staple providing
almost twice as many calories as potatoes weight for weight.33 But it is also
so low in protein content that, as one specialist warns, “in manioc-dominated
diets, protein-deficiency can lead to malnutrition and also aggravate
symptoms related to manioc cyanogenic toxicity.”34
We’ll return to that issue of toxicity in a moment but let’s note, meanwhile,
that peanuts have a very high protein content that makes them a perfect
nutritional “complement to starchy manioc-based diets.”35 Several authorities
have noticed the pairing of the two in ancient cultures and British botanist
Barbara Pickersgill speculates that the wide prehistoric distribution of peanut
cultivation may have accompanied the spread and uptake of manioc.36
Again I can’t help but wonder if there might not have been something
more active and intentional at work behind the scenes of this process than
mere “accompanying.” What I have in mind is the possibility that a deep
knowledge of plants and of their nutritional and other properties might have preceded the first domestication activities that we have evidence for. Surely
it is only on the basis of such foreknowledge that crops like groundnuts and
manioc could be selected, domesticated, planned, and planted to complement
each other’s nutritional contribution to human welfare?
This is pure speculation, of course. But it’s strengthened somewhat by the
curious nature of the manioc roots themselves, which (although there are
many varieties) are classified into two main categories—“bitter” and “sweet.”
All contain compounds known as cyanogenic glucosides, found in low
concentrations in the less popular sweet varieties and in very high
concentrations in the greatly prized and more widely used bitter varieties.37
The need-to-know element here is that if you eat any of the “bitter” varieties,
without first processing them in the correct way (extracting the glucosides),
you will at least suffer from “cyanic intoxication, with symptoms like
vomiting, dizziness, and paralysis,” if not die of cyanide poisoning.38
Ignorant of this, several of the soldiers on Francisco de Orellana’s
sixteenth-century voyage down the Amazon ate unprocessed manioc roots.
They survived but became mightily sick, near to death, as a result.39 To avoid
poisoning they would have had to peel the roots, then grate them, then strain
and press the resulting mash to remove the hydrocyanic acid, and at last toast
it to produce a fine faintly yellowish flour 40—simple but absolutely essential
procedures that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon have followed for
thousands of years to make “bitter” manioc safe.
The fundamental question, however, is exactly how and when this
processing system was first devised? Obviously since we have evidence of
the cultivation of domesticated manioc by 8,000, or perhaps even as much as
10,000 years ago, it follows that the ability to process it must already have
been developed by then. It would make no sense to anybody to go to all the
trouble of domesticating a species and then growing crops from that species
that nobody could eat without getting horribly, and perhaps lethally, sick.
That’s why I keep coming back to the haunting possibility that some person
or group of people with an interest in the Amazon already understood the potentials of manioc—and the exact steps that would have to be taken to
avoid its dangers—long before they ever chose to domesticate it and put it
under cultivation.41
Otherwise, frankly … why bother?
PLANT GNOSIS
THE MANIOC ISSUE LOOKS SIMPLE. You just need to peel it, grate it, soak it,
strain it, and meticulously cook it to remove the poison, and it is transformed
into a useful staple.42 All steps of the processing seem rather obvious and
basic in retrospect, but consider the amount of trial and error—the number of
volunteers you would have had to make sick or kill—before you arrived at
the right method.
And what would motivate you to start such a project in the first place,
unless you already knew the potential of the wild progenitor that would
eventually become domesticated manioc?
The same problem looms on an even larger and more complex scale with
other plants of the Amazon, the uses to which they are put, and the
processing they require. Anthropologist Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic
Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge, draws attention to curare, the
blow-gun and arrow poison, invented—we do not know when—in the ancient
Amazon. It produces paralysis and death by asphyxiation as the muscles
required for breathing cease to function. It is used, Narby explains, because
“it kills tree-borne animals without poisoning their meat while causing them
to relax their grip and fall to the ground. Monkeys, when hit with an
untreated arrow, tend to wrap their tails around branches and die out of the
archer’s reach.”43
A very useful hunting aid, therefore, and one, moreover, that has been
adopted into modern medical anesthesiology. But the real mystery, as Narby
goes on to show us, is how it was ever invented in the first place. The
consensus among scholars is that curare, of which there are forty types in the
Amazon made from seventy plant species, was stumbled upon by chance
experimentation.44 Narby doubts this scenario:
To produce it, it is necessary to combine several plants and boil them for seventy two hours, while avoiding the fragrant but mortal vapors emitted by the broth. The
final product is a paste that is inactive unless injected under the skin. If swallowed,
it has no effect. It is difficult to see how anybody could have stumbled on this
recipe by chance experimentation.45
The whole mystery of the Amazonian plant medicines, notably the vision inducing brew ayahuasca (which itself is a mixture of several plants that are
most unlikely to have been fortuitously brought together) is explored in depth
in my 2005 book Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of
Mankind. In these medicines, as in curare, as in terra preta, and as in the
incredible burst of domestication of plants and trees in the Amazon that
followed the end of the Ice Age, could we be looking at the cultural DNA not
only of a civilization but of a sophisticated civilization that had developed
sciences of its own that it began to share with other people—very much
including the peoples of the Amazon basin—around the time that the last Ice
Age came cataclysmically to its end?
Judging from the clues that lie scattered like tantalizing jewels across the
Amazon, this hypothetical lost science of a hypothetical lost civilization
would have looked very different from any of our own sciences, employing
not only empirical methods but also shamanistic techniques, vision quests,
and out of body encounters in the “spirit world” that most modern Western
intellectuals would regard as absurd. Again, however, if we go by the
evidence of the Amazon, the plain fact is that the remnants and borrowings of
this supposedly laughable form of science have again and again produced
practical and down-to-earth results—domesticating and processing huge
numbers of plants and trees, for example, or creating “miracle” soils that are
still fertile after thousands of years of use, or inventing muscle relaxants like
curare that inhibit acetylcholine receptors at the neuromuscular junction.
Moreover, unlike Western technology, to which the earth is a dead thing, this
ancient technology addresses all the needs, spiritual as well as physical, of
the human creature. Again, though the skeptics will scoff, none of the many
thousands of people who’ve had their lives transformed by ayahuasca in the
past 20 years would deny that something very powerful and very hard to
explain is at work here.46
15
SACRED GEOMETRY
FROM THE TIME OF ITS earliest appearance in the archaeological record (which
is absolutely not the same thing as the time that it first took shape)
Amazonian civilization is a continuum that does not break from the wisdom
and insights of its founders. The same basic principles, defining the
relationship between humanity and the cosmos continue to manifest and to be
re-expressed over thousands upon thousands of years, in some cases evolving
and developing into strange new growths, in others devolving and decaying.
But just like that enigmatic Australasian genetic signal still found among
Amazonian peoples today, other traces of ancient and mysterious
connections, though faint, have also survived.
For example, despite rejecting the old stereotypes of the “savage” and
“primitive” Amazon, and despite knowing that prehistoric civilizations of
some complexity had once flourished there, scientists at the beginning of the
twenty-first century were nonetheless taken aback to be presented with
overwhelming evidence of an ancient practice of geometry in the rainforest—
and on a very ambitious scale.
Let’s get one thing straight before we take a closer look at this mystery.
Just because people live in a dense jungle, and haven’t attended math classes
in high school, does not mean they have no grasp of geometry—“one of the
deepest and oldest products of human reason.”1
On the contrary, though often
wrongly attributed to Euclid, there is compelling evidence—mysterious in
itself—that “the conceptual principles of geometry are inherent in the human mind.”2
This evidence comes from an isolated region at the heart of the
Amazon where scientists from the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit of the
Collège de France led a study in which the indigenous Mundurukú people
were tested on basic geometry skills. The study found that:
Mundurukú children and adults spontaneously made use of … the core concepts of
topology (e.g., connectedness), Euclidean geometry (e.g., line, point, parallelism,
and right angle), and basic geometrical figures (e.g., square, triangle, and circle) …
and they used distance, angle, and sense relationships in geometrical maps to
locate hidden objects.3
In summary, therefore, isolated peoples in remote parts of the Amazon
today, whose contact with technological civilization is extremely limited,4
possess innate geometrical knowledge and are able to deploy it
“independently of instruction, experience with maps, or measurement
devices.”5
No doubt their ancestors, and probably most humans always, have
been blessed with the same neurological gift. Indeed, we see it made manifest
down the ages in all kinds of man-made structures. Even the simplest wattle and-daub hovels tend to be rectangular or square rather than randomly
shaped. Likewise, from England’s Stonehenge, to the Great Pyramid of
Egypt, to India’s Madurai Meenakshi Temple, to Borobudur in Indonesia, to
Angkor Wat in Cambodia, to Tikal in Guatemala, to Tiahuanaco in Bolivia—
and to countless other sites too numerous to mention—the design of the
sacred architecture of the world is entirely governed by geometry.
The very universality of this geometry, as an innate faculty of the human
mind, is not in doubt, but how it has been expressed by different civilizations
in different epochs is culturally driven. Thus, Angkor Wat is not the Great
Pyramid and the Great Pyramid is not Stonehenge. All three, however, share
the same fundamental geometries and connections to the cosmos that—I have
long argued—were incorporated into a system of architecture central to the
beliefs and lifeways of a lost civilization of remotest prehistory. When that
civilization was destroyed in the series of cataclysms that brought the last Ice
Age to an end, there were survivors who took the system with them, seeking
to replant it in the many different parts of the world where they found refuge.
In some it took root and flowered early, and over thousands of years it manifested in multiple different ways; in others it lay dormant for millennia
before bursting into exuberant life.
Mainstream archaeology recognizes no such universal system, nor even the
vestiges of one, and insists that there was no “diffusion” of ideas between
these ancient cultures (How could there be when Angkor is 3,500 years
younger than the Great Pyramid?). The point is fair but irrelevant to my
proposition which does not require diffusion within the past 5,000 or even the
past 10,000 years. Instead I suggest that the similarities and differences
between certain ancient monumental structures, created around the world at
different times by different cultures, are best explained by a remote common
ancestor civilization that left a legacy of ideas and knowledge in which they
all shared, which their priests, shamans, and sages sought to preserve, and
which they in due course deployed in their own different ways.
One of the hallmarks of this worldwide “system,” whether its widespread
presence is coincidental or not, is geometry. And, in turn, whenever the
geometry manifests on a monumental scale that could only be achieved by
skilled specialists and a large, well-organized workforce, the obvious
implication is that a fairly advanced civilization must have been involved.
That was why, when giant geometrical earthworks were discovered in the
Rio Branco area of the Brazilian state of Acre in the southwestern Amazon in
1977 nobody at first paid much attention. This was the era when the
Smithsonian’s Betty Meggers still reigned supreme over all things
Amazonian. Her Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise had been
published just 6 years before and her view that the jungle could never have
supported large populations or any form of civilization capable of
monumental architecture was the full-blown dogma of the day. Little wonder
then, although the Smithsonian had sponsored the National Program of
Archaeological Research in the Amazon that found the first “geoglyphs,” that
it did not announce the discovery until 11 years later.6
Locations of principal earthwork sites in the southwestern Amazon discovered by
2018.
The young man who actually spotted the earthworks from a Smithsonian
survey aircraft was Alceu Ranzi, and it was he who named them
“geoglyphs.”7
His career took him elsewhere for the next two decades but his
interest was sparked again after another overflight in 1999 and, now at the
Federal University of Acre, he resumed his research together with colleagues
Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará and Martti Pärssinen of the
University of Helsinki.
Their first detailed results were published in the December 2009 issue of
Antiquity,8
which trailed the findings as evidence of the existence in ancient
times of “a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the
upper Amazon Basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown
people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by
straight orthogonal roads.”9
At the outset of the paper, Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen described
“clusters of these monumental earthworks” mostly located on a 200-meter high plateau:
Formed by excavated ditches and adjacent earthen walls … the earthworks are
shaped as perfect circles, rectangles and composite figures.10
But why had these stunning Amazonian geoglyphs first been noticed only
a few decades previously?
Ranzi and his colleagues observe that while the geoglyphs were abandoned
about 500 years ago, and then heavily overgrown, they have since been
revealed by mass clearing of the forest for the cattle industry, thus becoming
visible, especially from the sky, over the past 30 years. Indeed, the enormous
size of the geoglyphs makes it easier to distinguish their shape and
configuration from an aerial perspective than at ground level, and satellite
imagery has been made freely available to researchers by Google Earth.11
NAZCA–AMAZON CONNECTIONS
TO THE EXTENT THAT THEY are best seen and understood for what they are from
the air rather than from ground level, comparisons with the famous “Nazca
Lines” of southern Peru were inevitable, and quickly began to be made—
particularly so since, in addition to its giant images of animals and birds, the
Nazca plateau also features many precise geometrical figures.12
Ranzi himself has invited the comparison by asserting that the Amazon
geoglyphs are “as important as the Nazca Lines”13 and, indeed, his own use
of the term “geoglyphs” was, according to his colleague and coauthor Denise
Schaan, inspired by the figures on the Nazca plateau. This, Schaan argues, is
“unfortunate” because the Nazca Lines “are a different phenomenon. In the
Nazca desert, geometric and zoomorphic figures were shaped by the
displacement of dark, weathered rocks on the surface to expose a lighter
subsurface. In Brazil and Bolivia, however, the ‘figures’ were produced by
the excavation of large, continuous ditches forming circles, rectangles,
hexagons, octagons and other, non-geometric, shapes.”14
Nazca geometry. PHOTOS: SANTHA FAIIA.
I’m not persuaded by this distinction. Whether a painter uses oils or
watercolors, the end result is still a painting. Likewise, although different
techniques and materials were used—unavoidable given the very different
environmental conditions of the Amazon and at Nazca—the end result in
both cases is still a “canvas” decorated with immense geometric, as well as
“non-geometric,” shapes.
Though it is now more than quarter of a century in the past, I recall vividly
my encounter with Maria Reiche, the venerable “lady of the lines,” at her
home in the town of Nazca where she had lived since 1945 surrounded by the
ancient geoglyphs that it was her fate to study, protect, and introduce to the
world. She had recently celebrated her ninetieth birthday when Santha and I
met her in June 1993. Although bedridden with advanced Parkinsonism, her mind was sharp and her voice clear when she shared with us her own view of
the significance of the lines:
They teach us that our whole idea of the peoples of antiquity is wrong—that here
in Peru was a civilization that was advanced, that had an advanced understanding
of mathematics and astronomy, and that was a civilization of artists expressing
something unique about the human spirit for future generations to comprehend.15
I have already explored the mystery of Nazca in previous books so I won’t
go over old ground here except to note that among the most iconic of the
Nazca geoglyphs, etched into the desert with a single unbroken line
extending for more than a mile 16 and occupying an area of approximately 90
meters by 60 meters 17 is an image of a monkey. Its prehensile tail, stylized
into a spiral, is a diagnostic feature of New World monkeys that distinguishes
them from Old World monkeys.18 However, no monkeys have ever lived in
the Nazca desert. The nearest specimens, for example, capuchin monkeys,
spider monkeys, and woolly monkeys, are all native to the Amazon
rainforest.19
Nazca monkey.
Another of the better-known Nazca geoglyphs looks like and is usually
referred to as a spider. It has been suggested, however, that the huge 46-
meter-long 20 image arguably does not depict a spider but a member of a
closely related order of millimeter-sized arachnids, the “tickspiders” called
Ricinulei.21 More than seventy species have thus far been identified
worldwide, not one of them in the Nazca desert. Nor should we expect any
there. Ricinulei favor “tropical forests and caves”22 and the nearest
populations of this very peculiar creature to Nazca are in the Brazilian
Amazon, specifically in central, eastern, and southern Amazonia.23
There are many strange things about the Ricinulei order, but strangest of
all is a single feature that is regarded as its distinguishing anatomical
characteristic.24 As described by Brazilian arachnologist Alexandre B.
Bonaldo, this is its “system of sperm transfer, which is achieved by an
elaborate copulatory apparatus in the male third leg.”25 Although barely a
millimeter long, and difficult to discern without magnification, it was first
pointed out by the late professor Gerald S. Hawkins of Boston University that
this unusual reproductive extension, common to all Ricinulei species, is
depicted in the correct place on the third leg of the Nazca “spider.”26
Hawkins, however, was an astronomer, while Bonaldo, a real expert on
South American spiders, disagrees, remarking in emails we exchanged in
October 2018:
The idea that the Nazca spider is a Ricinulei is kind of odd to me, since I always
thought it was a myrmecomorphic spider such as the species of Myrmecium …
Myrmecium is an exclusive South American genus, being recorded from the
Venezuelan Caribbean to southern Brazil, but the majority of the species (28 out of
38) are endemic to the Amazon Basin, including lower parts of the oriental
Andean slopes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
I asked if I could quote him on this and he replied:
Sure, you can quote it, if you want. I would add that that third leg
“modification” shows no structures and is not bilateral. It appears to be just an
extension of the drawing, as is common in other Nazca drawings.
Bonaldo then kindly referred me to Arthur Anker, a colleague of his who
specializes in macro photography, and Anker in turn provided me with the
image of Myrmecium from the Amazon (specifically from the Tambopata
Reserve, near Puerto Maldonado) that is reproduced here. It is, in my view, a
far better candidate for the Nazca spider than Ricinulei—and once again what
it suggests to me is that scientists, who observed nature closely, were at work
in ancient South America. But let’s lower our sights and simply say that the
monkey and “spider” figures, with their Amazonian provenance, call, at the
very least, for a rethink of Schaan’s view that the Nazca Lines and the
Amazon geoglyphs are unconnected phenomena.
Some FACTS AND FIGURES
ON THE AMAZONIAN Geoglyphs
WHAT IS THE GENERAL STRUCTURE and appearance of the geoglyphs uncovered
in the southwestern Amazon in recent decades? In their 2009 paper in
Antiquity, Schaan, Ranzi, and Pärssinen give us this broad overview:
In general, the geometric figures are formed by a ditch approximately 11m wide,
currently 1–3m deep, with adjacent 0.5–1m high earthen banks, formed by
deposition of the excavated soil. Ring ditches have diameters that vary from 90 to
300m. … When there are two or more structures, they are usually connected by
embanked roads. Some of the single rectangular structures may have short roads
coming out of their mid-sides or corners. Composite figures include a rectangle
inside a circle or vice versa.
27
Some of the figures are quite roughly executed, others are extremely exact,
and in some cases an exact figure is combined with an inexact one in the
same geoglyph, as at Santa Isabel, for example, where a large well-made
octagon is juxtaposed with an imprecise circle.
By contrast, the geometrically austere Fazenda Parana site is “comprised of
two perfect squares (200m and 100m wide) connected … by a 20m wide,
100m long causeway. The two squares are further connected to straight roads
leading east and west, north and south.”28
More complex by far is the Fazenda Colorada site.
Its geoglyphs consist
of:
one circle, a quadrangle and a double ditch structure which forms a three-sided
square. The three-sided square double ditch is connected to a trapezoidal structure
comprised by linear walls without ditches. Its south-western corner is open and
connects to a c. 55m broad, avenue-like, road; on both sides of the entrance one
can still see two high mounds, standing like towers. The road has embankments
which border both sides, and, as it extends away from the entrance, it narrows,
vanishing 600m further.29
Then consider the site known as Fazenda Atlantica. Here the principal
geoglyph forms a square measuring 250 meters along each side. Quadrants
are inscribed into the east and west corners and a circle 125 meters in
diameter, connected to the square by a causeway 10 meters wide, lies 150
meters to the northwest.30
Defined by the avenue connecting the square and the circle, it is clear that
the primary axis of Fazenda Atlantica runs northwest to southeast—an
orientation that makes it a candidate for alignment to the setting sun on the
June solstice and the rising sun on the December solstice. The reader will
recall that Serpent Mound in Ohio is also aligned northwest to southeast to
both these events. Its principal focus, signaled by its open jaws, is on the June
solstice–midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere, where the Serpent is
located, and midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, where the Amazonian
geoglyphs are located. Without an archaeoastronomical survey, however, it is
impossible to say whether or not the general northwest to southeast alignment
of Fazenda Atlantica is solstitial, and—if it is—whether any aspect of the site
indicates priority given to one solstice over the other.
A similar northwest to southeast orientation is seen at Tequinho, another of
the great Amazonian geoglyphs. When all its ancillary works were intact it
extended over an area of 15 hectares (37 acres). What remains today are its
two principal squares, the larger measuring 210-by-210 meters (with two
further squares inscribed within it) and the smaller, which has suffered
extensive damage, measuring 130-by-130 meters and enclosing one further
square. Defining the ruling northwest axis of the site, the main entrance to the
larger square is 40 meters wide and opens onto a causeway 1.5 kilometers
long.31 A proper survey will be required to establish whether or not there is
any archaeoastronomical significance to the northwest orientation of
Tequinho’s main entrance and causeway.
What is already certain, however, is that a number of other Amazonian
geoglyphs share the same general alignment. An example is Fazenda Iquiri II,
which combines a square earthwork measuring 140 meters along each side
with an oval earthwork formed by 25 adjoining mounds. The long axis of this
oval, paralleling the axis of the square, extends for 180 meters and is oriented
to the northwest,32 making this site, too, a candidate for possible solstitial
alignment if and when an archaeoastronomical survey is carried out.
Another candidate is the partially destroyed site of Coqueiral, which also
consists of a series of adjoining mounds, of which ten survive out of an
original total of eighteen. The remaining mounds form a partial oval with its
long axis extending to approximately 100 meters oriented to the northwest.33
As with Tequinho, as with Fazenda Iquiri II, and as with Fazenda Atlantica, a
proper survey will be required before any possible archaeoastronomical
significance of the Coqueiral oval can be investigated.
Indeed, as I review the otherwise excellent science so far dedicated to the
Amazonian earthworks, it is evident that the most serious and consequential
lapse—which must be remedied if further progress is to be made—concerns
this consistent blindness to possible archaeoastronomical connections. Not a
single one of the many papers on the geoglyphs reviewed in this chapter has a
word to say about astronomical alignments and, so far as I am aware at the
time of writing, not one of the leading scholars has shown any interest in
investigating the possibility that such alignments might exist. Ironically,
however, the same scholars all agree:
The geometric earthworks were constructed on carefully selected, elevated yet
level surfaces. Their location on interfluvial plateaux provided good visible control
over the surrounding terrain. … The carefully planned position of the earthworks
in the landscape and the recurring geometric forms represented in earthwork
architecture suggest functions that were part of a tradition of shared collective
ideology related to the cosmology and/or socio-political concerns of the ancient
peoples.
The irony is that there’s an important clue here, hidden in plain sight. It’s
true that the choice of “elevated locations” giving “good visible control over
the surrounding terrain” could have something to do with “the socio-political
concerns of the ancient peoples.” But because they offer an unobstructed
view of the horizon, such locations are also very often what ancient
astronomers looked for when they set out monuments on the ground—
aligned, say, to the June solstice sunset or to the March equinox sunrise.
Perhaps it’s partly in recognition of this that the passage cited above
includes a token reference to “cosmology.”
But token references are not enough.
Without a full-scale archaeoastronomical survey of the Amazonian
geoglyphs we are, in my opinion, unlikely ever to get to grips with the full range of challenges—and opportunities—that they represent.
AN EVER-RECEDING HORIZON
HOW OLD ARE THE GEOGLYPHS?
In 2009 only a single carbon date had been established for the entire area
surveyed, then “250 km across” and constituting “200 known sites with over
210 geometric structures.”34 The date was from Fazenda Colorada and
proved to be quite recent—around 750 years before the present but with a
margin of error that the investigators chose to average at AD 1283,35 a date
they believed to be “representative of a number of sites” since Fazenda
Colorada “exhibits much of the variability seen for the region.”36 This date,
they declare, “implies a late occupation … only around 300 years before the
Europeans’ arrival, but is consistent with the development of complex
societies in other areas of the Amazon between A.D. 900 and 1400.”37
As we’ve seen so often with archaeology, new discoveries can change
everything, and after just three more seasons of excavation, Ranzi, Schaan,
and Pärssinen were singing a very different song. In a follow-up paper to
their 2009 study, published in the Journal of Field Archaeology in 2012, they
reported a greatly expanded survey area, now encompassing roughly 25,000
square kilometers.38 Within it, 281 enclosures “formed by continuous ditches,
in most cases surrounding a perfectly geometric inner plaza with an area of 1
to 3 ha” had been found “in various shapes,” chiefly “circles, ellipses,
rectangles and squares.”39
Then came the first dynamite revelation. Fazenda Colorada had been
thoroughly re-excavated and five additional radiocarbon samples, collected
from different stratigraphic levels, were analyzed. Again, there are margins of
error with C-14 dating, but the bottom line is that the previous date of AD
1283, while fitting with preconceptions about when and where complex
societies developed in the Amazon, was found to have been taken from
organic materials deposited very late in the life of the site. What the new
samples indicated was that Fazenda Colorada had been “consistently occupied” from as early as AD 25 until around the end of the fourteenth
century.40
Organic materials from a number of other geoglyph sites were also
excavated and dated, showing a similar profile, and the overall conclusion of
the investigators across all the sites was that these “new radiocarbon dates
place the initial stage of earthwork construction as early as 2000 BP.”41
In summary, therefore, just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012
witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the
geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they’d been thought to be
just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to the
implications, they’d become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error
and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great
deal of attention if it concerned Western architecture—indeed it would be
like discovering that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres
and York Minster were not, in fact, works of the late medieval period but had
actually been built by the Romans.
What are we to conclude concerning mistakes of such magnitude, and the
tendency of archaeologists to reach and propagate premature conclusions
based on limited samples? For instance, the single AD 1283 date from
Fazenda Colorada being allowed to stand for 3 years without corroboration as
“representative of a number of sites”? And similarly at Serpent Mound in
Ohio, where in 2018 a date of around AD 1000 was still being touted in
official notices despite firm C-14 evidence, on the public record since 2014,
that the structure is more than 1,000 years older than that?42 Readers will
make up their own minds, but the uncertainty and the constant failure of old
models (such as Clovis First in North America and Meggers’s “counterfeit
paradise” dogma about the Amazon) do not fill me with confidence about
much else that this discipline has to say.
In particular, I am not persuaded by the new consensus that the geoglyphs
of the southwestern Amazon are 2,000 years old. Other C-14 dates mentioned
in the 2012 report already hint at a more complicated picture.
Take the site known as Severino Calazans, for example. Curiously, the
square geoglyph the archaeologists excavated here has the same massive
“footprint”—measuring 230 meters along each side 43—as the Great Pyramid
201
of Egypt.44 Both monuments are also cardinally oriented—that is, their sides
face the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west.45
Two C-14 dates for Severino Calazans were cited by Ranzi, Schaan, and
Pärssinen as further confirmation that the Amazonian geoglyph project began
“about 2000 years ago.”46 Margins of error apply, but these dates were 159
BC (from excavation Unit 3) and 171 BC (from Unit 6B).47 Fitting much less
comfortably into the new hypothesis, however, were the two other dates from
Severino Calazans. Again, there are margins of error, but these dates were,
respectively, 1211 BC (from Unit 5) and 2577 BC (from Unit 3)48—the latter
suggesting that this geoglyph might not only have the same footprint as the
Great Pyramid of Egypt but might also be about the same age.
We’ve seen how the existence of true civilizations in the Amazon before
European contact has been cautiously embraced by archaeologists in recent
years. Even so, few would yet be willing to accept that any Amazonian
“civilization” worthy of the name might have existed as early as 2577 BC and
certainly not one well-organized and motivated enough to create a cardinally
oriented geoglyph on the grand scale of Severino Calazans, where the full
perimeter, defined by an enclosure ditch 12 meters wide, measures 920
meters—more than 3,000 feet.49
Unsurprisingly, therefore, Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen conclude that the
date of 2577 BC “is probably unrelated to the time of initial construction of
the earthworks.”50
All they’re prepared to concede is that “this date suggests early human
activity at the site.”51 They perhaps stick their necks out further than most of
their peers would when they allow the possibility that the second anomalous
date from Severino Calazans—1211 BC—“may be related to earthwork
construction.”52
But what is the logic of this? If we have dispensed with our former
assertion that a date of AD 1283 was “somehow representative” of the
geoglyphs in general, and if we are going to allow a possible start on this
great regional project as early as 1211 BC, then why should we be unable to
contemplate an even earlier start as far back as 2577 BC? Since so little of the
Amazon has been surveyed by archaeologists, and since no theory about the
character and constraints of its past cultures and civilizations has been able to
explain all the data, it would surely be wiser to keep an open mind.
Besides, as Ranzi, Pärssinen, and Schaan themselves point out, they are
working with a very limited sample of the potential data. Pärssinen at one
point estimated that as many as 1,500 geoglyphs might ultimately be found,53
and the authorities are in general agreement that “these earthworks,
uncovered by modern deforestation … represent only a fraction of the total,
which lie undiscovered beneath the intact seasonal southern Amazonian
rainforests.”54
It is therefore perfectly possible that multiple other sites, as yet unknown to
archaeologists, will be discovered in the years to come. They might confirm
the existing archaeological model that the geoglyphs are about 2,000 years
old, or they might turn out to reinforce that anomalous date of 2577 BC—or,
who knows, they might even provide much older dates and reveal more
sophisticated constructions.
Once again, whatever the facts are on the ground, we won’t know for sure
unless we look.
CURIOSITIES
IT’S A CURIOSITY—I CLAIM nothing more at this point—that the square
enclosure ditch at Severino Calazans shares the ground plan, base
dimensions, and cardinality of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as well as a
carbon date from the epoch of the Great Pyramid.55 That epoch, moreover,
around 2500 BC, coincides and overlaps with the megalithic epoch in
Europe, so another curiosity is the way that the circular geoglyphs of
Amazonia resemble “henges”—the circular embankments with deep internal
ditches that surround the great stone circles of the British Isles. The scale is
very similar and the resemblance is so obvious that even the most sober
archaeologists, usually wary of cross-cultural comparisons, are willing to
remark upon it. For example, Dr. Jennifer Watling of the Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnography at the University of São Paulo, author of an
important study of the Amazonian earthworks published in the Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences in February 2017, states frankly that the
characteristics of the circular geoglyphs with their embankments and ditches
“are what classically describe henge sites. The earliest phases at Stonehenge consisted of a similarly laid out enclosure. … It is likely that the geoglyphs
were used for similar functions to the Neolithic causewayed enclosures, i.e.
public gathering, ritual sites.”56
A point of order here. A “henge” is a prehistoric earthwork formed by a
circular embankment surrounding a ditch. Usually the embankment is heaped
up from the soil removed to create the ditch. This is the case, for example, at
the causewayed enclosure of Avebury, Europe’s largest henge, which has a
diameter of approximately 420 meters.57 Walking briskly it takes about half
an hour to make a complete circuit of the lip of the Avebury embankment
from which you look down, across the ditch, at the immense circular inner
plaza that the ditch defines. Disposed at intervals around the outer perimeter
of this plaza, set back a couple of meters from its edge, a complete ring of
giant megaliths once stood in antiquity, encompassing two other stone circles
placed side by side. Very few of the original megaliths now remain—the site
having been used as a quarry in later times—but, although Avebury’s
causeways are almost entirely gone, the henge is still there and it is still
possible to make out the form of the great stone circle that it encloses and the
remnants of the paired inner circles. What cannot now be seen, but was
discovered in 2017 by archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar, is the
square formation, measuring 30 meters along each side, again defined by a
perimeter of standing stones, that once occupied the center of the
southernmost of the two inner circles.58
The Amazon: Squaring the circle at Jacó Sá. PHOTO: RICARDO AZOURY/PULSAR IMAGENS.
Strangely enough, at a site called Jacó Sá in the Amazon we also find a
geoglyph in which circle and square are combined, but here it is the square
that encloses the circle: “The square sides,” report Ranzi, Schaan, and their
colleagues, “are 140 m long, while the external embankment is 12 m wide
and 1.6 m high. The circle contains an internal embankment, and is 100 m in
diameter.”59
This mention of embankments raises a more general point. Though
Avebury is a true henge, Stonehenge—despite its name—technically is not.
This is because its original great circular ditch was cut outside, not inside, its
embankment.60 As Jennifer Watling remarks, it’s interesting to note that
some of the Amazonian geoglyphs have this same format “with an outer
ditch.”61 Some, like Jacó Sá, have both. As with the British henges, however,
so with the Amazon. Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen confirm that “the ditches”
of the Amazonian geoglyphs “are usually situated inside the
embankments.”62
A GLOBAL LEGACY?
JENNIFER WATLING’S PAPER, COAUTHORED WITH Denise Schaan, Alceu Ranzi,
and others, describes circular geoglyphs of the Amazon “with ditches up to
11 m wide, 4 m deep, and 100–300 m in diameter.”63 The authors argue that
these sites, “some of which have up to six enclosures … rival the most
impressive examples of pre-Columbian monumental architecture anywhere in
the Americas.” Their excavations found “an almost complete absence of
cultural material … within the enclosed areas.” They conclude that the
earthworks “were built and used sporadically as ceremonial and public
gathering sites between 2000 and 650 calibrated years before present, but
that some may have been constructed as early as 3500–3000 BP.”64
I’ve put the early dates in bold for two reasons.
First, because they are given in the paper at all. What we have here is a
group of mainstream archaeologists sticking their necks out a little bit further
in the pages of a prestigious journal on what, until now, would have been
thought of as an impossible achievement for Amazonian societies 3,500 years
ago.
Second, these same archaeologists are still being cautious. The period of
3500–3000 BP that they’re prepared to entertain for the construction of at
least “some” of the geoglyphs corresponds with Unit 5 at Severino Calazans,
where a sample yielded a date, within the usual margins of error, of 1211
BC.65
The paper makes no mention, however, of the other much earlier date of
2577 BC that was retrieved from Unit 366—the date that coincides with the
epoch of Stonehenge, Avebury, and the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Before I go further let me reiterate a key point about which it is important
to be absolutely clear. It is NOT my purpose here to insinuate that the
Amazonian geoglyphs were in any way inspired by Britain’s stone circles, or
by the Great Pyramid of Egypt or by other known Old World monuments—
or, for that matter, vice versa. Where there are similarities, my suggestion is
that it might be more fruitful to look for their origins in a remote ancestral
civilization that passed down a common inheritance all around the globe—an
inheritance of knowledge, an inheritance of science, an inheritance of “earth measuring” that was then put into practice in many different environments by
the many different cultures receiving it.
In some, the inheritance may have been rejected at the outset, or
subsequently frittered away and lost. In others, as millennia passed, locally
originated differences in expression multiplied to such an extent that they
often almost completely obscured the underlying genetic connections to a
remote common ancestor.
Nonetheless, dig deep enough and those connections—like recessive genes
—sooner or later make themselves felt.
Not all the henges of the British Isles contain stone circles; many are
simply gigantic earthworks like the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon.
No megalithic monuments have yet been found in the Brazilian state of Acre
where the geoglyphs proliferate—perhaps because of a lack of good natural
materials, or perhaps because so much of the area has yet to be properly
surveyed.
There are stone circles in the Amazon, however, as we shall see in the next
chapter.
next
THE AMAZON’S OWN STONEHENGE
source and footnotes
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