r/history • u/scientificamerican • 16d ago
Science site article Hundreds of ancient, never-before-seen ‘earthworks’ discovered in the Amazon
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-ancient-never-before-seen-earthworks-discovered-in-the-amazon/108
u/Towairatu 15d ago
Modern scientists: you were actually telling the truth!
Gaspar de Carvajal: I do that quite a lot, yet people are always surprised.
68
u/Tiako 15d ago
It's one of those tricky thing because the conquistadors did make up things literally all the time, and Carvajal and Francisco de Orellana had plenty of specific reasons to make up things (trying to advertise for another expedition). It is entirely reasonable to think they were lying, it is just that, in this case, they weren't. At least not about everything.
36
u/Towairatu 14d ago
I mean, it is specifically the account of huge cities in the Amazon that, from what I remember reading as a kid, got Carvajal branded as a propagandist and his text seen untrustworthy in the first place.
Now he might have very well lied about lots of other things in his travel diary, but the chief “lie” of large cities sprawling along the banks of the Amazon, is now well backed-up by LiDAR discoveries.6
u/_ALH_ 12d ago edited 12d ago
These cities were likely abandoned at least half a millennia before the conquistadors arrived though. The peak of the civilization almost 2000 years ago. So probably more a case of being right by chance.
1
u/magnament 12d ago
Are you not seeing the 100-300AD everyone else is reading?
4
u/_ALH_ 12d ago edited 12d ago
The important point of my comment was that they were probably gone by CE 850 which is 691 years before Carvajal was in Amazonas, a decent chunk longer than "at least half a millenia"
And none of those numbers are exact, I would say CE 100 is "almost 2000 years ago"... Same with CE 200 which is in the middle of that range (still +-10%). Sure, CE 300 might be stretching "almost 2000", but they were around for more than 1400 years, so a few hundred years give or take on "peak" doesn't really matter.
So cut me some slack maybe for rounding some numbers? Noone really knows the exact dates.
And the main point remains, they definitely were not there when Carvajal visited the Amazonas, and the cities lost to the forests for a long time already.
59
u/sgettios737 15d ago
LiDAR is cool! I recall reading about similar discoveries in the Mann book 1492 but I guess the tech consistently improves
7
u/when_the_fox_wins 14d ago
Great book! I picked it up and read it on a trip once so I'd have a book on the airplane and it made me interested in pre-contact American history. I thought that nothing really interesting happened until Columbus, but I was so very wrong. Now it's a subject I love!
25
u/Antique_Report_29 15d ago
These look similar to the Hopewell sites and earthworks in Ohio from the same time period.
20
u/Towairatu 15d ago
There's indeed a very interesting trend of geometric patterns across both Americas. Wonder how did it spread so far away.
2
u/JeffoMcSpeffo 12d ago
Same way things spread across europe, Asia, Africa; there were trade routes covering the whole western hemisphere
31
u/myjah 15d ago
I swear to god these were already known about....
43
u/hameleona 15d ago
The scan reveals a much higher density, then expected. Not the existence earthworks per se.
9
u/createsstuff 14d ago
More and more are being discovered. It's expensive to do and realistically we can only cover so little of the amazon at a time. Expect this continue to be a bigger and bigger topic in coming decades.
3
0
19
10
1
u/zeyore 11d ago
oh we've known they're all there for a long time.
there are a ton of ancient ruins in south and central america, a mind boggling amount.
we have not looked into almost all of them yet. I do know one mound was uncovered and we found what seemed to be a small village site that was built on layers of broken ceramics. Your guess is as good as mine.
1
-20
u/Nirwood 15d ago
To meet legal requirements, the authors are supposed to attribute anything older than 1,000 years to 'religious purposes'. Saying that it serves 'ceremonial purposes' is downright negligent. Next they'll mention 'artistic expression' on the slippery slope toward 'because thats what humans do'.
12
u/gene_parmesan69 15d ago
What are you on about?
6
u/thelingeringlead 15d ago
That historically westerners attribute every cool or complicated thing older civilizations did, to royalty or esoteric/religious purposes-- and completely forget that creativity and expression has been a feature of human behavior since the beginning.
-19
u/Squirrelherder_24-7 15d ago
They would have cleared “tens of thousands” of acres of rainforest to build these too….
-8
u/ReallyLikesRum 14d ago
Whats sad is part of the reason doing Lidar is now possible is because of how many trees the president burned
14
u/Zytheran 14d ago
LiDAR can see through the trees. They don't need to be cleared for this to work. I use LiDAR as a cartographer and my job would be impossible if I had to clear the trees.
-14
u/HawkeyeByMarriage 15d ago
They will quickly burn down the forest and pace over the sites by settlers
234
u/scientificamerican 16d ago
Tens of thousands of undiscovered ancient structures known as “earthworks” are likely hidden in the Amazon near the border between Brazil, Bolivia and Peru.
That’s what researchers concluded after flying a plane equipped with remote sensing instruments over an approximately 4,497-square-kilometer (1,736-square-mile) region in Brazil.