Millions of people may have inhabited the southwestern Amazon rainforest roughly 2,000 years ago, part of an ancient civilization that archaeologists now suspect was much larger than previously thought.
The civilization, known as the Aquiry, likely peaked between 100 and 300 C.E. During the time, scientists estimate between 1.25 million to 3 million people inhabited more than 70,600 square miles of what is now northern Brazil, an area about the size of North Dakota.
Archaeologists came up with those figures based on the results of a recent aerial survey using lidar, a laser-based, remote sensing technology that produces detailed, three-dimensional maps of the landscape. They found nearly 400 previously undocumented geometric earthworks, known as “geoglyphs,” in a 1,740-square-mile area, which they used to estimate the Aquiry’s population size and geographic sprawl.
The findings, detailed in a new paper published July 29 in the journal Nature, add to a growing body of evidence showing that the Amazon is not an untouched wilderness but, rather, a landscape that has been shaped by humans for centuries.
As I understand it, unlike famous stone-builders to the North and West, these peoples built with wood, which when not maintained, would have disappeared in only a few years.
Another point is that civilisation is in many ways an extension of mass agriculture, which would presumably have been the case here. Meaning, I expect that these peoples cleared a lot of land at one time, which was later recovered by the Amazon jungles.
