Ancient Earth Carvings Found in Amazon Jungle

December 31, 2009

Environmentalists bemoan the clearcutting of the Amazon rainforests. But an unexpected bonus has turned up: Beneath cleared jungle archaeologists are uncovering mysterious geometric designs carved into the earth.

Environmentalists bemoan the clearcutting of the Amazon rainforests. But an unexpected bonus has turned up: Beneath cleared jungle archaeologists are uncovering mysterious geometric designs carved into the earth.

With the help of satellite imagery from Google Earth, Brazilian archaeologists are finding more and more of the earth carvings, called geoglyphs, in the Amazon rainforest.

According to a story on environmental blog TreeHugger, The geoglyphs are believed to have been sculpted by ancient people from the Amazon region around 700 years ago, though their purpose is still unknown. So far, nearly 300 geoglyphs have been identified, but with advances in satellite imaging — and increased clearing of the jungle coverage — scientists are hoping to discover many more of these strange, geometric designs.

www.treehugger.com...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/e36f77605044.jpg[/atsimg]
Difficult to see from the ground, geoglyphs like this one often go unnnoticed. Now, thanks to the ready availability of satellite imaging, many are being uncovered.

Amazing find, there has to be much more in the undergrowth that they haven't found yet, sure this is just the tip of the iceberg.

nice topic.......hopefully we can find out a bit more information.....is there a link to more of the glyphs?

Great.. lets cut down some more trees - this is doing a great service to science and enables anthropologists and other assorted scientists to attract grants to investigate the phenomena and feed their families while the world goes down the tubes. Hey, we all have bills to pay!

I'd rather they remain hidden, given that the one thing we have not managed to learn from 'ancient and lost civilisations' is how to prevent ourselves from imploding.

There really isn't a 'bonus' side to cutting down the rainforests...

As time passes we will find more and more of them IMO.
For what it's worth I finished this book back in July. I enjoyed every page.

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/67676134d4fb.gif[/atsimg]
‘The Lost City of Z’: In search of an Amazon explorer who disappeared in 1925

Fawcett, who reportedly “regarded the risk of death as the most piquant sauce of life,” had studied at the Royal Geographical Society in London. He had learned there how to lead an expedition, make pillows from mud, provide merriment in grim times for fellow explorers; how gunpowder could be used as an emetic if poison had been swallowed. He had been taught all about flesh-eating piranhas and electric eels that shot 650 volts into their victims. He was more than ready, at the end of his course, to set off into the wilderness as a leader of other men.

Before long, the Geographical Society had sent him to Bolivia to map the borders between Bolivia, Brazil and Peru. A year ahead of schedule, he had completed his assignment and was back in England looking for a new adventure.

On a 1910 expedition, again to Bolivia, he managed to befriend some Amazon Indians. They were musical and artistic. He came upon shards of skillfully designed ancient ceramics. And he began wondering if there might not once really have been a rich city in the depths of the jungle.

[edit on 1-1-2010 by SLAYER69]

This is great, it makes a refreshing change to the doom and gloom we see a lot of.

It's interesting that they are only visible from the air, did these people create them so that a race from another planet could view them, or did they have an idea that one day in the future we would be airborne and see the message? really interesting stuff

reply to post by SugarCube


I agree with you on this completely, Graham Hancock talks about the growing of soya beans in the Amazon so the world can eat burgers, very sad, if the rainforests are destroyed so goes the planet.

reply to post by SLAYER69


Thank you for the link to the Lost City of Z, have heard of it and will put it on my amazon list of books to buy..

Not surprising and not unexpected:

news.nationalgeographic.com...

Superdirt Made Lost Amazon Cities Possible?
John Roach for National Geographic News November 19, 2008

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization.

But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

www.re-char.com...

Once upon a time, way back in the sixteenth century, the Spanish Conquistador Francisco de Orellana was the first European explorer to travel up the Amazon River and into the Rio Negro, a huge tributary, upriver from present-day Manaus. The exploration reached perhaps some 1500 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. For Orellana and his unfortunate companions it was a terrible trip plagued with every kind of adversity which, in the end, left him as the sole survivor to return to the Court of the King of Spain to tell the story.

But what a story it was. We might even speculate that Orellana survived the ordeal in order to complete his mission of telling of having found Eldorado — fantastic golden cities in the heart of the forest of the New World. Orellana reported something even more unbelievable than gold — there was an advanced indigenous civilization with many high density human settlements. Huge Indian populations were living along the waterways of Amazônia and, according to Orellana, at one place there was a city of continuous side-by-side houses stretching for twenty miles. His tale was both fantasic and fabulous. I doubt that the Spanish Court could really embrace the thought of a civilization more advanced than their own but they sure could imagine the gold.

www.sas.upenn.edu...

He rolls out a 1958 U.S. Air Force photo of a Bolivian savannah. Even with the vast acreage blown up to movie-poster size, the details are as impenetrable as braille to the sighted. “See that,” he says, pointing to a line running across the landscape. “Anything that’s straight—it’s not natural.” With a finger, he traces a symmetrical block of toothpick shapes. “These are raised fields. See, you can pick out the linear patterns.” With Erickson’s narration, more and more geometric designs pop off the glossy print—settlement mounds, fish weirs, irrigation canals, roads. The photo begins to look like a prehistoric engineering blueprint. Unlike most archaeologists, Erickson doesn’t begin his research in excavated holes; he starts in the sky, reading the landscape for markers of vanished civilizations.

For the past decade, Erickson has used aerial images—borrowed from the military, scientists, and even oil companies—to guide his fieldwork. What he’s discovered about the prehistoric Amazon challenges many textbook teachings. Before Columbus, he argues, the area was heavily populated and agriculturally advanced. His work has led to a surprising supposition: Humans may have engineered nearly every aspect of the Amazon landscape.

news.mongabay.com...

Pre-Columbian Amazon supported millions of people. The Virgin Forest? Amazon Myths and New Revelations* The Amazon has a long history of human settlement. Contrary to popular belief, sizeable and sedentary societies of great complexity existed in the rainforests of this region. These societies produced pottery, cleared sections of rainforest for agriculture and managed forests to optimize the distribution of useful species. The notion of a virgin Amazon is largely the result of the population crash following the arrival of the Europeans in the sixteenth century. Studies suggest that at least 10-12% of the Amazon's terra firme forests are "anthropogenic in nature" resulting from the careful management of biodiversity by indigenous people. However, unlike most current cultivation techniques, these Amazonians were attuned to the ecological realities of their environment from five millennia of experimentation and accumulation of knowledge, with a strong understanding of how to manage the rainforest to meet their requirements within a sustainable capacity. They saw the importance of maintaining biodiversity through a careful balance of natural forest, open fields and sections of forest managed so as to be dominated by species of special interest and greatest use to humans. The idea that the Amazon is not an untouched wilderness but the product of extensive management by large human populations sharply contrasts with long-held views that the region was sparsely populated by tribal groups who peacefully coexisted with the apparently hostile environment that surrounded them. The leading defender for this traditional view is Betty J. Meggars, director of the Latin American Program at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History in Washington and author of "Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise."

There's lots more to be found if people would look and accept what they see.

so I guess this means that 700 years ago there wasnt as much rainforest?
I guess what I'm saying is did the pre-columbian civilizations cut down alot of the rainforest before europeans arrived? is that why all this stuff is hidden in there, because it wasnt there before?

if thats the case why not cut some down if there are ruins in there. obviosly it'll grow back

reply to post by Totalstranger


Correct. There was still plenty of rainforest, but it had sizable villages (I would hesitate to call 'em "cities" throughout it that bore agriculture. The people there thinned out the forest around them, burned a lot of it, and mixed the charcoals into the soil to create terra negra.

However there are a few caveats - one, though they cleared the undergrowth, the natives weren't flattening vast tracts of miles and miles and miles to support their agriculture and building. Two, even what they were doing was certainly (initially) a problem for the environment around them. But much as how the people to the north extended the great plains eastward, the people of the Amazon encouraged a more human-friendly environmet to develop.

A lot of what we think of as "untouched wilderness" in the Americas was anything but. The huge flocks of carrier pigeons and gigantic herds of bison weren't natural - they were the result of lack of competition and hunting from the Indians, who had been largely wiped out. Without Indians collecting the mast from the eastern forests - and of course leaving their own crops untended - the carrier pigeon population exploded into the masive flocks. In the plains, a combination of lack of Indians, and pressure from the eastern forests spreading into the plains (lack of Indians to control them with burning) resulted in the gigantic bison herds.

Prior to European contact, the Americas were basically two continents worth of carefully-managed farmland for thirty million people. That's why writings of early contact with the Indians have stories of big towns, kings and big headmen, parklike forests, vast fields. Things that today we, growing up with image of the Indian as just another animal living in a completely untouched primeval wilderness, tend to laugh at.

Fact is, it was the deaths of all those Indians that resulted in the appearance of untrammeled wilderness and vast herds and flocks of animals. It's just that Europeans moved slower than their diseases, and so didn't see the change happen.

reply to post by apacheman


Thank you for your research and links apacheman, there is so much to learn if you want to get to the truth.

Excuse me...

Ancient earth carvings, 700 years ago?

Am I missing something?

Was there carvings of Atlantis or something?

Are the writings ancient?

Nice find anyways.

reply to post by vjr1113


When dealing with the Western Hemisphere, anything pre-columbian is regarded as "ancient".

It's a completely European conceit, of course, but that's the way it works.

reply to post by Aquarius1


You're very welcome.

There's lots more if you search for it. I've been following this subject for many years now, trying to piece together a realistic view of the pre-Contact Americas. From what I've gleaned it was pretty much wall-to-wall people, since the cultural focus seems to have been on developing crops that had extreme viability ranges and worked together to provide complete nutrition. Look at the population explosion that occurred in Europe following the introduction of just a few of the botanicals developed in the Americas and it's hard not to assume huge populations. Some researchers think that 100,000,000 per continent isn't too far off the mark.

Then came contact and some 90-96% of everone died within a few decades at most.

www.hist.umn.edu...

library2.usask.ca...

en.wikipedia.org...

www.slideshare.net...

These Old World diseases came in many different forms, the most lethal of which was smallpox followed closely by influenza, measles, diphtheria, typhus, cholera, bubonic plague, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis .8 Most of these diseases have been recognized by other scholars studying the topic except for one : bubonic plague. Dobyns is the only one to claim that this `terror' of the Old World also struck the western hemisphere . In fact, Dobyns claimed that bubonic plague hit the New World four times between 1545 and 1707.9 The 1612-1619 and 1707 plagues ostensibly hit the east coast, devastating both the Louisiana and New England tribes . No other scholar has corroborated Dobyns' plague theory . This is not to say, however, that epidemics did not affect these tribes during the years mentioned by Dobyns . In fact, there is significant evidence available suggesting that a massive epidemic hit the New England area around 1618-1619. But there is no documentation stating what the contagion was .

www.thirdworldtraveler.com...

the island's population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus's arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half before the year 1496 was out. And after 1496 the death rate, if anything, accelerated.
In plotting on a graph the decline of Hispaniola's native population there appears a curious bulge, around the year 1510, when the diminishing numbers seemed to stabilize and even grow a bit. Then the inexorable downward spiral toward extinction continues. What that little blip on the demographic record indicates is not, however, a moment of respite for the island's people, nor a contradiction to the overall pattern of Hispaniola's population free-fall following Columbus's arrival. Rather, it is a shadowy and passing footnote to the holocaust the Spanish at the same time were bringing to the rest of the Caribbean, for that fleeting instant of population stabilization was caused by the importation of tens of thousands of slaves from surrounding islands in a fruitless attempt by the Spanish to replace the dying natives of Hispaniola.
But death seized these imported slaves as quickly as it had Hispaniola's natives. And thus, the islands of the Bahamas were rapidly stripped of perhaps half a million people, in large part for use as short-lived replacements by the Spanish for Hispaniola's nearly eradicated indigenous inhabitants. Then Cuba, with its enormous population, suffered the same fate.... overall in central Mexico the population fell by almost 95 percent within seventy-five years following the Europeans' first appearance - from more than 25,000,000 people in 1519 to barely 1,300,000 in 1595.
For the Andean society as a whole ... within a century following their first encounter with the Spanish, 94-96 percent of their once-enormous population had been exterminated; along their 2000 miles of coastline, where once 6,500,000 people had lived, everyone was dead....The earliest European mariners and explorers in California ... repeatedly referred to the great numbers of Indians living there. In places where Vizcaino's ships could approach the coast or his men could go ashore, the Captain recorded, again and again, that the land was thickly filled with people. And where he couldn't approach or go ashore "because the coast was wild," the Indians signaled greetings by building fires-fires that "made so many columns of smoke on the mainland that at night it looked like a procession and in the daytime the sky was overcast." In sum, as Father Ascension put it, "this realm of California is very large and embraces much territory, nearly all inhabited by numberless people."

Add to those the numberless dead of the interiors of both Americas and the Jewish Holocaust of WWII would be merely a footnote of a minor side event.

this may be a little off topic,but years ago i saw a documentary about the black extremely fertile soil found to have a strange bacteria, in ancient amazonian ruins and have not heard anything since, cant find any documentaries on it and was wondering if anyone knows of any
terra preta phenomenon
www.amazingcarbon.com...'Grady%20and%20Rush%20-%20the%20Terra%20Preta%20phenomenon.pdf

Originally posted by SugarCube
Great.. lets cut down some more trees - this is doing a great service to science and enables anthropologists and other assorted scientists to attract grants to investigate the phenomena and feed their families while the world goes down the tubes. Hey, we all have bills to pay!

I'd rather they remain hidden, given that the one thing we have not managed to learn from 'ancient and lost civilisations' is how to prevent ourselves from imploding.

There really isn't a 'bonus' side to cutting down the rainforests...

They do not cut them down to study them - and where they do it is so minimal it is not measurable.

The forests are being destroyed by clearing for farming - not research.

There were many HUGE civilisations in the forests with very complex societies - the Mel Gibson Film Appolypto was incredibly interesting for anyone who knew the history - it was a true film.

The cultures died because they exhausted the ability of the forest to sustain them - they brought on drought through over farming and literally died over night.

The temples you often see were, like in the film, for sacrifice of humans. They were sacrificing them in their hundreds - they would cut off all their digits,, penis extremities - and then finally cut off their jaw bone and tie their wrists to their ankles behind their head and make a wheel - then roll the person down the steps.

The story of these cultures, like Easter Island - is a foreboding warning to us all about over population.

reply to post by audas

The forests are being destroyed by clearing for farming - not research.

Absoutely audas, as I mentioned in an earlier post much of it is done to grow soya beans so Westners can have burgers.


[edit on 1-1-2010 by Aquarius1]

After some quick research, I found some coordinates you can put into Google Earth or Maps.

10°12'13.32S 67°10'18.09W
a square

10°22'1.61S 67°43'24.89W
a few faint circles

10°18'24.51S 67°13'12.50W
faint geometric shapes and lines, circle diameter=140m meters (475 feet)

10°13'49.01S 67° 7'26.71W
a diamond, side lengths about 70 to 90 meters (242 to 284 feet)

10°17'14.08S 67° 4'32.97W
very clear circle, diameter 30 meters (94 feet)

10°13'5.25S 67° 9'28.94W
another clear circle, diameter=170 meters (554 feet)

10°18' 06.64S 67° 41'41.55W
circle, diameter=90 meters (280 feet)

10°11'27.65S 67°43'20.11W
circle, diameter=200 meters (652 feet)

10° 27' 58 S 67° 44' 25 W
circle, diameter=110 meters (357 feet)

10° 31' 34 S 67° 37' 59 W
several circles, diameters=140, 110, and 60 meters (460, 332, and 185 feet)

source:www.amazonia.org.br...

reply to post by l77way


Your topic is very interesting, but the link isn't working for me.

reply to post by Aquarius1


700 years isnt really ancient... i remember seeing an ariel photo about 5 or 6 years ago of tribes still living in the Amazon Jungle so they are probably descendants from that era...

And yeh there probably will be more to find in the Amazon but do we really want to go cutting it all down? It's vital for our Atmosphere!!

I also reckon when the Antartica melts away there will be Glyphs, carvings & Hidden caves to explore.... still a lot to find out on this planet me thinks....