Amazon once populated with ancient 'urban' settlements
Friday, 29 Aug 2008 00:09
The Amazon rainforest is thought to have contained significant ancient urban centres
Science In Focus
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Scientists have claimed that the Amazon rainforest once contained a number of significant urban centres.
A new study published in the journal Science today claims that ancient settlements, now almost entirely obscured by tropical forest, existed in the "virgin" forest and that the Amazon is in fact heavily influenced by historic human activity.
Anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil compared the settlements to those in medieval
Europe and ancient Greece.
"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," Mike Heckenberger, a University of Florida professor lead author of the report, said.
"Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."
Today's report suggests that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and villages set out in organised patterns.
While the towns were not the same size as those found in Greece, they were surrounded by large walls and each had an identical road positioned from the northeast to the southwest, in keeping with the mid-year summer solace, connected to the central plaza.
Such detailed urban planning is a definite indicator for urban society, Mr Heckenberger argues.
"These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns," he said.
"They have quite remarkable planning and self-organisation, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism," he said.
The discovery of the major human settlements will change the way scientists now assess flora and fauna in the Amazon rainforest.