npr:
Sometime between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago, people living in the Amazon region of what is now Brazil constructed huge land carvings: geo-glyphs in the shape of squares, circles, ovals, rectangles and octagons.
The New York Times reported on these geo-glyphs last week. These ceremonial symbols — if indeed, as some archaeologists suspect, that’s what they are — have been known for some time. As deforestation in the Amazon accelerates, however, more of these earthworks are coming to light. With them comes increased certainty that past Amazonian peoples carried out intensive agriculture and lived in large-scale geo-polities.
These facts have crashed up against my stubbornly implanted, but false, mental images of pre-Columbian Amazonia: huge swaths of emerald and unbroken forest teeming with monkeys, jaguars, birds, and insects — but housing only a few, small, scattered groups of human hunter-gatherers.
—Barbara J King
