A retiree poring over online satellite images led archaeologists to the ancient earthworks, the most recent in a series of finds made possible by satellite imagery, airborne radar, and drone-mounted cameras that are making ecologists and conservationists abandon longstanding notions of the Amazon as a virgin wilderness.
“It is all one type or another of human-influenced forest,” said anthropologist Michael Heckenberger at the University of Florida in Gainesville…. In the Amazon, “they were weaving their cities out of the forest itself.”…
Francisco Nakahara, a retired financial manager in São Paulo who studies free online satellite photos as a hobby, first spotted the traces of circular earthworks, the researchers said. The archaeologists, who reported their findings in Nature Communications Tuesday, then cataloged the discoveries using Zoom Earth and Google Earth….
At their height, the settlements may have been home to as many as one million people. Most of them likely succumbed to diseases brought by European explorers and slavers, while the forest reclaimed their homes, roads and plazas, the scientists said.
“Many parts of the Americas now thought of as pristine forest are really abandoned gardens,” said Colorado State University archaeologist Christopher Fisher, who uses aerial laser radar to explore sites in Central America covered by forest canopy. “When you are on the ground, you cannot really see the landscape. You need a bird’s-eye view.”
For the report in Nature Communcations, see here.
For a related article on Central America, see here.
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