Thursday, August 20, 2020

Part 5:America before: The Key to Earth’s Lost Civilization ....Black Earth...Gardening Eden...Sacred Geometry

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 168 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.

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 170 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 175 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.

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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.”

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, 180 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.
Hundreds of Geoglyphs Discovered in the Amazon
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 
Exclusive Travel to Peru's Southern Coastal Region With LANDED TravelNazca 11
In Peru's Nazca Desert are hundreds of geometric designs. These ...Nazca geometrical drawings2 – ENKI SPEAKS
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 
Unexplained Mysteries: The Nazca Lines of Peru - YouTube
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. 
Nazca Spider | The spider geoglyph near Nazca. The figure is… | FlickrFalse ant sac spider (Myrmecium sp, Corinnidae, Clubionoidea) - a ...
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 
The Fazenda Paraná earthwork (photo by Diego Gurgel) | Download ...Aerial photograph and plan of the Fazenda Paraná site (photograph ...
Aerial photograph and plan of the Fazenda Colorada site ...In Photos: Mysterious Amazonian Geoglyphs | Live Science
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
Fazenda Atlântica. Fonte: Google Earth (2015). Fonte Rampanelli ...
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  
Satellite Images Reveal 81 Pre-Hispanic Settlements in the Amazon ...
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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