Great ancient civilizations in amazonia?

Even though the first Europeans who sailed up the Amazon circa 1540 reported large, well-populated cities on the Amazon flood plains, modern archeologists have generally traveled to the high Andes for "high" ancient civilizations in South America. In retrospect, this is not surprising. By 1700, the cities of the 1540s had been swallowed up by the jungle. Besides, most thought, the conditions in the lowland tropics are too harsh to nourish advanced societies. Fortunately, a few archeologists have recently invaded Amazonia with aerial sensors, magnetometers, and the oldfashioned shovel. And indeed there once was a high civilization along the great river; and, some say, it may have spread from the lowlands to the Andes far to the west. What a turnabout in archeological outlook -- if sustainable by facts.

One intriguing site in Amazonia is the island of Marajo, 15,000 square miles in area, located at the mouth of the Amazon. Here are found some 400 huge dirt mounds, including one with a surface area of 50 acres and a volume of a million cubic yards. Radiocarbon dates suggest that Marajo had been occupied for over a thousand years.

Nearby, on the Tapajos River in Brazil, A. Roosevelt found elaborate pottery, finely carved jade, and a culture going back perhaps 7,000 years.

In other parts of Amazonia, surveys uncovered tens of thousands of acres of raised fields connected by causeways. There remains little doubt that an advanced, complex civilization dwelt in Amazonia for millennia. Archeologists are now asking where these people came from and how they were related to the Incas to the west and civilizations to the north in Central America.

From www.science-frontiers.com

Do you think there are in the Amazon?

[edit on 26/8/2009 by Conspiracyintheuk]

reply to post by Conspiracyintheuk


What's so ridiculous about it?
Can you explain why you emphasized that in the title?

Cheers

Sorry i just got it from the title in that website.

reply to post by Conspiracyintheuk



Ancient America Rocked!

I do believe that a truer or should I say a more accurate history of Ancient America has not been completed yet, They are digging up older and older settlements and some artifacts just don't seem to fit into the time line that has been so neatly laid out before us and that leads us in new directions which in turn teaches us a new version of events and so on.

There is a lot of jungle that has yet to be explored and as with most archeological endeavors it's been mostly based on luck. For example look at Caral Supe. Nobody thought to look in that area and it turned out to be one of the oldest in the new world. The question becomes was that the oldest?
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Source

Last December, Haas and Creamer again made headlines with a paper in Nature that presented carbon datings for 13 sites with platform mounds and residential complexes in river valleys near Caral.

Some appeared to be even older than Caral, with dates as early as 3200 B.C. “It is now clear,” the couple wrote, that Caral and other Supe Valley sites “were parts of a much more extensive cultural system that reached across at least three valleys and an area of 1,800 square kilometers.” They called the region the Norte Chico, a colloquial term for the north-central coast of Peru. And they mentioned Shady only in their footnotes.

One of the major problems with early Proto-civilizations is that many of them never needed to develop the wheel for example or even writing. Look at ancient Egypt the very early periods, no wheel. Yet they developed and prospered.

In South America there is no real way to know just how many cultures flourished and then died out for various reasons and there could have been many groups of mound builders. [atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/af1f430ecdfb.jpg[/atsimg]
These groups may have never developed writing nor used large stone blocks. The jungle could have reclaimed such locations and rain would have just simply washed away the evidence of mud mounds and huts, what we are left with are simple stone carvings on wall surfaces such as what was found in Brazil "The Ingá stone"
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Inga Stone

The Ingá Stone (Pedra do Ingá in Portuguese) is located in near the small city of Ingá in the Paraíba State in the northeast of Brazil. The Ingá Stone is also called Itacoatiara do Ingá. The word Itacoatiara means stone in the Tupi language of the natives that lived in that area. It is composed of some basalt stones covered with symbols and glyphs undeciphered until now.

Most scholars think its origin is related to the natives that lived around until the 18th century, but there are also some people that defended an extraterrestrial origin. Most glyphs represents animals, fruits, humans, constellations (including the Milk Way), and other unrecognizable images.

And
El Fuerte Bolivia[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/1e010e9c35aa.jpg[/atsimg]

Not far away from Samaipata, one of the most important archeological monuments of pre-Columbian time in Bolivia can be found: El Fuerte (The Fortress). This archeological place has been declared Cultural Patrimony of Humanity by UNESCO. This mysterious place has been given many hypothetical explanations for its origins. It is supposed that El Fuerte is the work of the Amazonian pre-Incan 'Chané' culture, and later on was used as an advanced city by the Incas and finally by the Spanish colonists that turned El Fuerte into a fortress.

El Fuerte near Samaipata from aside village near el fuerte El Fuerte is the largest carved stone in the world. This archaeological monument reaches a height of 1.949 metres above sea level and is on the ridge of a hill of a sandy rock where ancient cultures sculptured figures but emphasized snakes and pumas, as well as waterways and wells, triangular and rectangular seats, vaulted niches, among other details.

We know for example that these cultures flourished right up until the first Europeans in 1492 showed up in the new world and all the early explorers stated that there were people everywhere all up and down the eastern coasts of North America the Caribbean and South America. We know that man was in the Caribbean very early on


Ortoiroid people

The Ortoiroid people were the first human settlers of the Caribbean. They are believed to have originated in the Orinoco valley in South America, migrating to the Antilles from Trinidad and Tobago to Puerto Rico.

Rouse theorizes that the Ortoiroid developed for a large amount of time in South America before moving to the West Indies.[1] The earliest radiocarbon date for the Ortoiroid is 5230 BC from Trinidad; the latest date is 190 AD from Puerto Rico.

Even in North America if we traveled up the Mississippi at that time. We find Mound builders who were possibly contemporaries of the Aztec and maybe even the Maya

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Cahokia

Cahokia kəhoʊkiːə is the site of an ancient Native American city (650-1400 CE) near Collinsville, Illinois in the American Bottom floodplain, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri. The 2,200-acre (8.9 km2) site includes at least 109 man-made earthen mounds. Cahokia Mounds is the largest archaeological site related to the Mississippian culture, which developed advanced societies in eastern North America centuries before the arrival of Europeans.[1]

Cahokia was settled around 650 CE during the Late Woodland period. Mound building did not begin until about 1050 CE, at the beginning of the Mississippian cultural period. The inhabitants left no written records beyond symbols on pottery, shell, copper, wood, and stone.[4]. The city's original name is unknown.

reply to post by Conspiracyintheuk
Good idea for a thread and, so far, not a sniff of astronauts, peaceloving hippies or OMG! amazing technology. S&F. The area beneath the rain forests is inevitably still preserving fascinating ruins and evidence of times past. Last year, a guy examined satellite images of an area of Brazil, Mato Grosso, and discovered unknown remains of towns.

"These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns." "They have quite remarkable planning and self-organisation, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism," he said. Although the remains are almost invisible, they can be identified by members of the Kuikuro tribe, who are thought to be direct descendents of the people who built the towns.

'Lost towns' discovered in Amazon

These aren't the fabled 'first civilizations' but civilizations from around the 13th Century. Excavations are still continuing in a race against big business and regional politics. Preservation of heritage doesn't bring in the money like exploiting the natural resources. Furthermore, the weight of wealth and power is rarely on the side natural and historical tourism. Far more wealth can be generated faster by logging the area and expanding settlements.

Here, we present clear evidence of large, regional social formations [circa (c.) 1250 to 1600 A.D.] and their substantial influence on the landscape, where they have altered much of the local forest cover. Specifically, archaeological research in the Upper Xingu (Mato Grosso, Brazil), including detailed mapping and excavations of extensive earthen features (such as moats, roads, and bridges) in and around ancient settlements, reveals unexpectedly complex regional settlement patterns that created areas of acute forest alteration.

Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest
or Cultural Parkland?

I hope these settlements, towns and maybe cities, get a chance to be recorded for history before they're ploughed up, concreted and buried under a more modern urban sprawl. They're all stepping stones we can follow back to ever earlier people. S America's got a lotta questions there!

The wood civilizations

Man found the stone based civilizations quite easily and later the mud brick ones too. The wood ones, all based in places where vegetation growth is rapid and erosion quick all disappeared. But archaeology can detect the violation of the soil caused by the use of wooden pillars.

These civilizations are slowly emerging from the soil of Euorpe, SE Asia, the Amazona.

Kewl stuff