Suburbs in the Amazon? From ‘Pristine’ Amazon Hosted Large Cities, Study Finds:
Brazil’s northern Amazon region, once thought to have been pristine until modern development began encroaching, actually hosted sophisticated networks of towns and villages hundreds of years ago, researchers said on Thursday.Archeological evidence and satellite images show the area was densely settled long before Columbus and European settlers arrived, with towns featuring plazas, roads up to 150 feet wide, deep moats and bridges, the researchers found.
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Nineteen evenly spaced villages were linked by straight roads, and the cluster could have supported between 2,500 and 5,000 people, said the researchers, led by Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida.The villages were all laid out in a similar manner — and the roads were mathematically parallel. “This really blew us away,” Heckenberger said in a telephone interview. “It’s fantastic stuff.”
Heckenberger, who worked with indigenous chiefs from the Upper Xingu region as well as a team at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, said the settlements dated to between 1200 A.D. and 1600 A.D.
“Every 3 km to 5 km (mile and a half to two miles) there is another village or town,” he said. “Some of these villages are 50 hectares in size … maybe 150 or so acres in total size,” he added.