'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization

'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization

www.sciencedaily.com

The new paper reports that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and smaller villages organized in spread out "galactic" patterns.
None of the large towns was as large as the largest medieval or Greek towns. But as with those towns, the Amazonian ones were surrounded by large walls – in their case, composed of earthworks still extant today. Among other repeated features, each Amazonian settlement had an identical formal road, always oriented northeast to southwest in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice, connected to a central plaza.

The careful placement of the like-oriented settlements is indicative of the regional planning and political organization that are hallmarks of urban society, Heckenberger said.

"These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns," he said.

The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that "if you find it in Europe, it's a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else," Heckenberger said.

"They have quite remarkable planning and self-organization, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism," he said.

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[edit on 30-8-2008 by projectvxn]

There's alot of our history we just don't know. Buried under the canopies of the South American Amazon lies mysteries we can't conceive of... And the Rabbit hole gets deeper... I wonder when they will figure out that the world has ALWAYS been international...


www.sciencedaily.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Most of the world had sophisticated civilizations while most of Europe lived like cave people...then came the brits and killed and raped and erased as much as they could from as many places as possible..and the US and Israel are intent in keeping it that way telling their people that their never were "real" civilizations before, not "good" ones anyway...sorry for the rant but I long for a world where nations and civilizations are aloud to "be", diverse and beautiful, and not bombed to the ground by a bunch of inbred banksters.