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<< Other Photo Pages >> Acre Geoglyphs - Misc. Earthwork in Brazil

Submitted by bat400 on Friday, 17 November 2017  Page Views: 18706

Multi-periodSite Name: Acre Geoglyphs
Country: Brazil
NOTE: This site is 508.906 km away from the location you searched for.

Type: Misc. Earthwork
Nearest Town: Rio Branco
Latitude: 8.75S  Longitude: 67.4W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
no data Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
2
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Acre Geoglyphs
Acre Geoglyphs submitted by dodomad : Preview of a Google Earth KML file created by James Q Jacobs, showing 500 recently discovered Geolglyphs in Bolivia (Vote or comment on this photo)
Hundreds of Geometric Earthworks, some only roughly circular or square, others very regular, are being found in western Brazil along the Acre River nears is outflow into the Purus River. The figures are continuing to be revealed as forest has been cleared for modern agriculture and other development.

The earthworks are formed by ditches up to 30 yards wide and 1-2 yards deep. They range from 100 to 300 yards in diameter and are thought to date from around 2000 years ago up to the 13th century. Some of the figures are associated with pre-contact village sites and plots of 'Indian Earth'. Other figures appear to be independent of settlements and may be ceremonial in nature.

This site listing will serve as a repository for general news stories and studies of these earthworks.
Other specific site listings will locate individual earthworks over time.

The location given represents the flow of the Acre into the Purus, and does not locate a specific earthwork.

A list of scholarly sources:
"Pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the upper Purus: a complex society in western Amazonia", by Parssinen, Schaan, and Ranzi, Antiquity 83 (2009): 1084-1095.
"Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil", by Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Sanna Saunaluoma, American Anthropologist, doi:10.1111/aman.12923, (2017)


Note: James Q Jacobs has been in touch with details of his web site containing videos and Google Earth downloads of many hundreds of geoglyphs in Bolivia and across the border in Brazil. See the latest comments on our page for details.
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Acre Geoglyphs
Acre Geoglyphs submitted by dodomad : James Q Jacobs writes: I'm posting a placemark file of the geoglyphs I could find. Recently local archaeologists thought, given the known distribution and the amount of the area deforested so far, only ten percent of the geoglifos were known. Some are visible in YouTube videos that are not yet seen on Google Earth. Hundreds exist and more will be visible and discovered as new areas of Google Earth... (Vote or comment on this photo)

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 19.1km ESE 124° Acre 'Geoglyphs' - Cruzeirinho Misc. Earthwork
 22.2km SE 129° Acre 'Geoglyphs' - Mustafa Misc. Earthwork
 24.8km E 82° Acre 'Geoglyphs' - Boca de Acre Misc. Earthwork
 98.6km SSW 201° Rio Branco Geoglyph 1 Misc. Earthwork
 115.5km S 177° Acre 'Geoglyphs' - Ranch Parana Misc. Earthwork
 121.7km SSW 202° Rio Branco Geoglyph 2 Misc. Earthwork
 139.6km SSW 192° Rio Branco Geoglyph 3 Misc. Earthwork
 139.9km SSW 192° Rio Branco Geoglyph 4 Misc. Earthwork
 146.7km SSW 194° Rio Branco Geoglyph 5 Misc. Earthwork
 152.4km S 191° Rio Branco Geoglyph 7 Misc. Earthwork
 156.8km SSW 196° Rio Branco Geoglyph 8 Misc. Earthwork
 162.2km SSW 196° Rio Branco Geoglyph 9 Misc. Earthwork
 163.6km S 171° Rio Branco Geoglyph 25 Misc. Earthwork
 164.1km SSW 192° Rio Branco Geoglyph 10 Misc. Earthwork
 164.1km SSW 192° Amazonian Geoglyphs Misc. Earthwork
 164.9km S 171° Rio Branco Geoglyph 26 Misc. Earthwork
 165.4km S 171° Rio Branco Geoglyph 24 Misc. Earthwork
 167.4km S 170° Rio Branco Geoglyph 23 Misc. Earthwork
 170.5km S 190° Rio Branco Geoglyph 15 Misc. Earthwork
 170.8km S 191° Rio Branco Geoglyph 14 Misc. Earthwork
 171.1km SSW 192° Rio Branco Geoglyph 11 Misc. Earthwork
 171.6km S 191° Rio Branco Geoglyph 13 Misc. Earthwork
 171.7km SSW 192° Rio Branco Geoglyph 12 Misc. Earthwork
 174.2km S 174° Rio Branco Geoglyph 22 Misc. Earthwork
 175.6km S 191° Rio Branco Geoglyph 16 Misc. Earthwork
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"Acre Geoglyphs" | Login/Create an Account | 16 News and Comments
  
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Re: Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest by archaeo on Sunday, 24 April 2022
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FYI, just recorded geometric earthwork number 1,000 this morning.

I'll be updating my web content in short order, last data update, XLS ans KML, was not many day ago. HTML update was at the end of the year.

http://jqjacobs.net/archaeology/geoglyph.html

More news here, including links to lots of aerial photos:
https://googleearthcommunity.proboards.com/thread/2106/amazon-geoglyphs
[ Reply to This ]

Re: Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest by Anonymous on Saturday, 26 October 2019
I am Mimi76. I documented a lot of these on Google Earth years ago. Only coming back to it now that the image resolution (and land clearing) has increased so much.
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Amazon Geoglyphs by Andy B on Friday, 17 November 2017
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James Q. Jacobs (Archaeo) from Tidewater, Oregon writes:

During recent survey activity of updated, hi-res images in Google earth, I see new placemarks of some of the 500 geoglyphs. For more extensive coverage, go to my website and download the KML.

I have not yet added the new survey results, but will update there in due time.
Hundreds of Geoglyphs Discovered in the Amazon
http://www.jqjacobs.net/archaeology/geoglyph.html

Naming is a problem in this area. As I discover new earthworks, I have to decide what to call them. One solution I'm using in Bolivia is downloading the topographic maps to find local naming of rivers, etc. Those are often Native names, which we should favor.

Calling an earthwork "Rio Branco Geoglyph 22" when it is far from Rio Branco, a town, and near Placido de Castro is wrong. I consider my naming tentative and realize some of the geoglyphs are locally named, even cited in scientific papers, just unknown to me. This aspect needs more work. Meanwhile, so much remains to survey and that has priority.

At the same time, I'm analyzing the geometry of landscape placement across the region and in relation to Andean and global monuments. To follow those developments, watch my ArchaeoBlog:
http://www.jqjacobs.net/blog/
[ Reply to This ]

Ancient Amazonians built earthworks to communicate with animals, spirits, stars by bat400 on Wednesday, 13 September 2017
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A beautiful, elaborate series of large earthworks in Brazil acted as doors and pathways for communicating with animals, departed spirits and celestial bodies, an anthropological study has found.

In the indigenous territories of south-west Amazonia, this massive series of ancient geometrical earthworks dominates the landscape. There are thought to be more than 500 geoglyphs in the region, including circular, square, octagonal and U-shaped mounds and trenches. They are up to several metres deep and cover hundreds of square metres.

They were involved in the ceremonies of ancestral indigenous people from about 3,000 years ago, until they fell out of use. Until now, much of what was known about the ancient history of this area had come from ceramics. Ceremonial pottery was found at the sites, with patterns that local people said related to rituals carried out, for example, at the time of puberty.

Working closely with the Apurina and Manchineri indigenous people of the area for 15 years, anthropologist Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen has been piecing together the roles of these structures. Virtanen's findings are published in a study in the journal American Anthropologist.

"What is important here is that the indigenous perspective is key. When we leave behind western ways of thinking of the world we start to see these things differently," Virtanen told IBTimes UK.

"The geoglyphs were related to the changing path of the sun and the path of the moon. In general, this is where people interacted with different non-human beings.

"Certain geometric forms such as the square are also very important in symbolising strength. It really pictures the strength of the people and the connectivity with four different cardinal directions."

Many of the sites were used at different stages of life. People may have returned to them after long absences in some cases, or used them continuously for years at a time.

Even before the colonisation of South America, the geoglyphs were slowly abandoned. Forests grew over many of them, obscuring them from view. It's thought that there could be many more hidden in forested regions that have yet to be discovered.

Newcomers to the area frequently did not respect the geoglyphs, building houses and farms in and around them. Some of the earthworks have been destroyed.

"In some cases, farmers can take a tractor and just move the earth," Virtanen said. "But most of them are still there."

In the protected lands of the Apurina and Manchineri people, the earthworks are still more or less preserved, even if they are not actively used. They have been proposed to join the UNESCO World Heritage List, and are already under some degree of national protection in Brazil.

"We know that the view of ancient Amazonia in general is completely changing. People thought that in Amazonia there were only small hunter-gatherer societies.
"But here is something very atypical. The ancestral people here didn't use stones or other materials, they simply moved the land.
"These are amazing huge landscapes where you see the human history and you see the history of indigenous people played out. There are very important marks of history written in the landscape," Virtanen concluded.

For more, see: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk
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    Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil by bat400 on Wednesday, 13 September 2017
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    "Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil", by Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, Sanna Saunaluoma, American Anthropologist, doi:10.1111/aman.12923, (2017)

    ABSTRACT
    Producing geometric designs and images on materials, such as pottery, basketry, and bead artwork, as well as the human body, is elemental and widespread among Amazonian Indigenous peoples. In this article, we examine the different geometric forms identified in the precolonial geoglyph architecture of southwestern Amazonia in the context of geometric design making and relational ontologies. Our aim is to explore earthwork iconography through the lens of Amerindian visual arts and movement. Combining ethnographic and archaeological data from the Upper Purus, Brazil, the article shows how ancient history and socio-cosmology are deeply “written” onto the landscape in the form of geometric earthworks carved out of the soil, which materialize interactions between nonhuman and human actors. We underline skills in visualization, imaginative practices, and movement as ways to promote well-balanced engagements with animated life forms. Here, iconography inserted in the landscape is both a form of writing and also emerges as an agent, affecting people through visual and corporal practices. [geometric designs, earthworks, visualization, movement, Amazonia]

    RESEARCH ARTICLE
    Visualization and Movement as Configurations of Human–Nonhuman Engagements: Precolonial Geometric Earthwork Landscapes of the Upper Purus, Brazil
    [ Reply to This ]

More immense geoglyphs discovered and documented in the Amazon by Andy B on Friday, 02 January 2015
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More immense geoglyphs discovered and documented in the Amazon

Recently updated imagery in Google Earth has allowed for renewed and new surveys, revealing numerous immense earthworks. Nearly 400 "geoglifos" are now placemarked in a single Google Earth file.

Follow this link for KML downloads, videos, article links, images, and an Excel database:

Hundreds of Geoglifos Discovered in the Amazon
http://jqjacobs.net/archaeology/geoglyph.html

and see here for our Brazil listings to see the sites we have listed
http://www.megalithic.co.uk/search.php?query=&country=90&category=0&sitetype=59

With thanks to Coldrum for the link
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Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World by Andy B on Wednesday, 18 January 2012
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As he cleared trees on his family’s land decades ago near Rio Branco, an outpost in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon, a series of deep earthen avenues carved into the soil came into focus.

“These lines were too perfect not to have been made by man,” said Mr. Araújo, a 62-year-old cattleman. “The only explanation I had was that they must have been trenches for the war against the Bolivians.”

But these were no foxholes, at least not for any conflict waged here at the dawn of the 20th century. According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.

The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.

Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.

“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.

More in the New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/americas/land-carvings-attest-to-amazons-lost-world.html?_r=2

with thanks to Jackdaw1 for the link
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Re: Acre 'Geoglyphs' - Cruzeirinho by Anonymous on Tuesday, 02 August 2011
My observation is that the Bolivian circular earthworks appear to effectively prevent erosion in the lower rectangular plots. Quake damaged circles do show erosion at the faults.

I'd put forward the hypothesis that concentric earthworks attenuate the runoff speed and volume of pre-columbian terraced farmlands. They were designed and created for this express purpose. I propose a test be made of the hypothesis in some suitable and convenient location.

Too, I would speculate that irregularly shaped rectangular geoglyphs below the circular mounds were made by design in order to attenuate erosion. I suspect that agricultural plots were not individually owned, so having equal shares wouldn't be an issue.
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Fantastic aerial footage of numerous geoglyphs on BBC Unnatural Histories programme by MikeAitch on Monday, 27 June 2011
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Fantastic aerial footage of numerous geoglyphs about 29mins into Unnatural Histories on BBC iPlayer.

The Amazon rainforest is the epitome of a last great wilderness under threat from modern man. It has become an international cause celebre for environmentalists as powerful agricultural and industrial interests bent on felling trees encroach ever deeper into virgin forest. But the latest evidence suggests that the Amazon is not what it seems.

As more trees are felled, the story of a far less natural Amazon is revealed - enormous manmade structures, even cities, hidden for centuries under what was believed to be untouched forest. All the time archaeologists are discovering ancient, highly fertile soils that can only have been produced by sophisticated agriculture far and wide across the Amazon basin. This startling evidence sheds new light on long-dismissed accounts from the very first conquistadors of an Amazon teeming with people and threatens to turn our whole notion of wilderness on its head. And if even the Amazon turns out to be unnatural, what then for the future of wilderness?
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'GoogleEarth Helps Find El Dorado' - Headline Excess aids Biog of Nutter Adventurer by bat400 on Thursday, 14 January 2010
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For nearly 500 years, explorers have hunted for a lost city— now with Google Earth, it may have been found.

Submitted by coldrum -- The legend of a lost Amazon civilisation has beguiled explorers and led many to their deaths. Some called their dream El Dorado. Others, notably Colonel Percy Fawcett, the gloriously moustached British explorer, named it the City of Z.

Scientists have now come close. The journal Antiquity published a report showing over 200 massive earthworks in the upper Amazon basin. The study's archeologists and historians believe these shapes are the remains of roads, bridges, moats, avenues and squares that formed the basis of a civilisation that could have supported 60,000 people.

It is an astonishing find. Since the 1980s anthropologists have uncovered evidence of civilisations in the Amazon basin: this latest development trumps them all.

David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, says, “For centuries, scientists assumed the jungle was a death trap, where only small, primitive, tribes existed. These discoveries show the Amazon was home to a large civilisation that built a sophisticated society with monumental earthworks.”

The dream of finding lost civilisations in South America has persisted. As John Hemming, a former director of the Royal Geographical Society, recounts in his book, The Search For El Dorado, the conquistadors started the craze. The idea of a “golden city” in the wilds was lodged in the European imagination and never released its hold.

Grann notes a 1753 Portuguese soldier of fortune emerged from the Amazon describing how, “after a troublesome peregrination, incited by the greed of gold”, he had walked into a city, finding “stone arches, a statue, wide roads and a temple with hieroglyphics”.

Fawcett, sent on missions to South America by the Royal Geographical Society, read the bandeirante’s report. He was gripped. In 1918, he tried to raise funds for an expedition and was dismissed as a crackpot. Undeterred, in 1920 he led a shambolic mission to find the lost city - ending when he had to shoot his horse. Fawcett’s expeditions often had an amateurish feel. The explorer’s eccentricity masked a fervent conviction in the existence of a lost city. In 1925 Fawcett, near-destitute, set out on his second and last expedition to find the City of Z. He wrote to his wife: “You need have no fear of any failure.” But he was never seen again.

Nearly a century after Fawcett’s disappearance, his instincts appear to have been proved correct. “Although he expected the City of Z to be built of stone, and he had a more fantastical notion of what it would look like, these discoveries show that he was ... extraordinarily prescient,” says Grann.

Others are not convinced. Hemming says that while the paper in Antiquity is “significant work by serious people ... none of this has anything remotely to do with El Dorado or that racist, incompetent nutter Percy Fawcett.

Both men can agree that this discovery is an advance in our knowledge of the region. The breakthrough was years in the making. In 2002 Martti Parssinen, one of the report’s co-authors, was called by Alceu Ranzi, who saw geometrical shapes while flying over the Amazon. Remembers Parssinen, “He realised they must have been made by indigenous people.” “We are only beginning to understand Amazonia.”

Grann believes this discovery will lead to a reassessment of pre-Columbian Amazon. He says, “the study's authors estimate only 10% of the earthworks [are found]. It will take decades to uncover the Amazonian civilisations.”

It has also taken decades for Fawcett’s reputation to be revived. Whatever Fawcett’s foibles, he does appear to have been broadly right. Moreover, his memory will be prolonged by a film adaptation in which he will be played by Brad Pitt. Talk about a comeback.
For more, see Read the rest of this post...
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    Re: 'GoogleEarth Helps Find El Dorado' - Headline Excess aids Biog of Nutter Adventur by bat400 on Thursday, 14 January 2010
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    David Grann must be laughing all the way to the bank as the media falls over itself to link these fascinating earthwork finds to the legend of El Dorado and the ill fated Percy Fawcett. Even the Times only vaguely touches on the modern research (actually going back to the 1960's) that has been finding evidence Pre-Columbian Amazon cultures who built permanent structures, created prepared gardens, and possibly shared complex cultural characteristics. (See another Bolivian site listing on the Portal, Loma Chacolatalito.)
    [ Reply to This ]
    Re: 'GoogleEarth Helps Find El Dorado' - Headline Excess aids Biog of Nutter Adventur by davidmorgan on Thursday, 14 January 2010
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    Peter Fleming's Brazilian Adventure is a good read.
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Ancient Amazon Society by bat400 on Friday, 08 January 2010
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Submitted by coldrum --- More on the culture(s) in the Amazon Basin that were responsible for the geometric earthworks now being recognized are the area is developed.

Hundreds of circles, squares, and other geometric shapes once hidden by forest hint at a previously unknown ancient society that flourished in the Amazon, a new study says. Satellite images of the upper Amazon Basin taken since 1999 have revealed more than 200 geometric earthworks spanning a distance greater than 155 miles (250 kilometers).

Now researchers estimate that nearly ten times as many such structures—of unknown purpose—may exist undetected under the Amazon's forest cover. At least one of the sites has been dated to around A.D. 1283, although others may date as far back as A.D. 200 to 300, said study co-author Denise Schaan, an anthropologist at the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil.

The discovery adds to evidence that the hinterlands of the Amazon once teemed with complex societies, which were largely wiped out by diseases brought to South America by European colonists in the 15th and 16th centuries, Schaan said. Since these vanished societies had gone unrecorded, previous research had suggested that soils in the upper Amazon were too poor to support the extensive agriculture needed for such large, permanent settlements.

"We found that this picture is wrong," Schaan said. "And there is a lot more to discover in these places." The newfound shapes are created by a series of trenches about 36 feet (11 meters) wide and several feet deep, with adjacent banks up to 3 feet (1 meter) tall. Straight roads connect many of the earthworks.

Preliminary excavations at one of the sites in 2008 revealed that some of the earthworks were surrounded by low mounds containing domestic ceramics, charcoal, grinding-stone fragments, and other evidence of habitation.

But who built the structures and what functions they served remains a mystery. Ideas range from defensive buildings to ceremonial centers and homes, the study authors say. It's also possible the structures served different purposes over time, noted William Woods, a geographer and anthropologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence who was not involved in the research.

What most surprised the research team is that the earthworks appear in both the region's floodplains and the uplands. In general, the Amazon's fertile floodplains have been popular sites for ancient civilizations, while the sparser uplands have been thought to be largely devoid of people, the researchers say.

What's more, the earthworks in both regions are of a similar style, suggesting they were built by the same society. "In Amazonian archaeology you always have this idea that you find different peoples in different ecosystems," study co-author Schaan said. "And so it was kind of odd to have a culture that would take advantage of different ecosystems and expand over such a large region."



The uplands sites appear to have been home to as many as 60,000 people, Schaan and her colleagues suggest in their paper, published this month in the journal Antiquity. That figure is based on estimates of the social organization and labor that would have been required to build the structures hinted at by the remaining earthworks. According to the University of Kansas' Woods, the population estimate is reasonable, albeit rough, since so little is known about these complexes.



For more, see National Geographic.
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Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest by bat400 on Wednesday, 30 December 2009
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I believe that one of the more complex earthworks, a group of squares, may lie at lat -8.845, long -67.255. It is near Boca do Acre.
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    Re: Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest by bat400 on Monday, 01 February 2010
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    Yes, this is one of the Brazilian geometric earthwork sites. It's known as the Cruzeirinho site.
    This is a link.
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Ancient Amazon civilisation laid bare by felled forest by bat400 on Tuesday, 29 December 2009
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Submitted by coldrum ---
Signs of what could be a previously unknown ancient civilisation are emerging from beneath the felled trees of the Amazon. Some 260 giant avenues, ditches and enclosures have been spotted from the air in a region straddling Brazil's border with Bolivia.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.

"It's never-ending," says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. "Every week we find new structures." Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.

Their discovery, in an area of northern Bolivia and western Brazil, follows other recent reports of vast sprawls of interconnected villages known as "garden cities" in north central Brazil, dating from around AD 1400. But the structures unearthed at the garden city sites are not as consistently similar or geometric as the geoglyphs, Schaan says.

"I firmly believe that the garden cities of Xingu and the geoglyphs were not directly related," says Martti Pärssinen of the Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes in Madrid, Spain, who works with Schaan. "Nevertheless, both discoveries demonstrate that [upland] areas of western Amazonia were heavily populated much before the European incursion."

"Many of the great early civilisations had a riverine basis and the Amazon has long been underestimated and overlooked in that sense," says Colin McEwan, head of the Americas section at the British Museum in London.

Though there is no evidence that the Amazonians built pyramids or invented written language as societies in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia did, "in terms of a trend towards increasing social complexity and domestication of the landscape, this wasn't just a pristine forest with isolated nomadic tribes", McEwan adds. "These were substantive, sedentary and in the long term very successful cultures."

"I have no doubt that this is only scratching the surface," says Alex Chepstow-Lusty of the French Institute for Andean Studies in Lima, Peru. "The scale of pre-Columbian societies in Amazonia is only slowly coming to light and we are going to be amazed at the numbers of people who lived there, but also in a highly sustainable fashion. Sadly, the economic development and forest clearance that is revealing these pre-Columbian settlement patterns is also the threat to having enough time to properly understand them."

For more, see http://www.newscientist.com.
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