Per decenni ci è stato detto che l'Amazzonia era un "inferno verde" incapace di sostenere popolazioni numerose. Ma recenti scansioni LiDAR in luoghi come la valle di Upano stanno rivelando reti di oltre 6.000 piattaforme, strade perfettamente dritte e prove di un'avanzata agroforestazione come la "Terra Preta" (terra scura amazzonica).
Ho realizzato un breve mini-documentario che approfondisce come questo cambi completamente la nostra comprensione della storia, la tragica realtà del primo contatto e i misteriosi geoglifi lasciati.
Potete guardarlo qui: https://youtu.be/XlzEyIJm0EM?is=7RxWeW7d8XilXfC3
Cosa ne pensate? Stiamo solo grattando la superficie di un'enorme civiltà perduta nel bacino amazzonico?
(Nota: l'audio è in italiano, ma ho attivato i sottotitoli in inglese con traduzione automatica!)
by Lost_Demand
5 Comments
This is not a new discovery though? We’ve known for quite some time that the reports of early Spanish explorers that described thriving communities along the Amazon river were true and that the image of the Amazon as a pristine forest is wrong. What we are finding out, thanks to new techniques like LiDAR, is that there were many more and much bigger settlements than even those explorers reported. There’s little evidence they followed a different or more complex path of societal and technological development compared to their known neighbours though. (And the concept of ‘civilization’ as qn overarching term has become rather contentious in modern archeology as we’ve come to realise that it’s not as black and white as we previously thought.)
It’s chilling to consider that many of these societies collapsed largely without ever knowing about the Europeans who brought the fatal diseases to the Americas. Not that different from North America, where later settlers found largely empty lands while we now know there was a substantial native population that was killed off by an expanding wavefront of disease.
When I learned that the soil of the Amazon is an artificial mixture I was totally blown away. Something so small, yet so large. For a civilization to be able to do something like this as well as their advanced knowledge on stars paints a picture of many unknowns and possibly a civilisation much older than currently understood.
Nothing new here at all!
What’s not really discussed here is that there has been archaeology in these contexts, including before LiDAR. The LiDAR results are obviously exciting and massively expand our picture of the cultures here, but the framing in the video going from exploration early in the 20th century to LiDAR glosses over the archaeology in between.
From the Science article on the LiDAR results,
> Groups of earthen platforms have been archaeologically explored: They form large settlements extending over the 70- to 100-m-high alluvial terraces along the river. Few sites have been excavated. One of the largest settlements, Sangay, was discovered in the late 1970s and excavated by three successive teams. Started in the mid-1990s, the Upano interdisciplinary project brought together archaeologists, geoscientists, and archaeobotanists to investigate the entire valley. The scope of the fieldwork results, which have led to a better understanding of the valley’s earthworks, has recently been broadened by LIDAR survey…
> Given that previous fieldwork had already provided information on the internal organization of residential sites, we focused on the “gaps” between settlements and the road network rather than on intrasite features.^1
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1. Rostain, Stéphen, et al. “Two Thousand Years of Garden Urbanism in the Upper Amazon.” *Science* 383, no. 6679 (January 12, 2024): 183–89. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adi6317.
Percy Fawcett was the Alt history influencer of his day. Running more on vibes and intuition than any kind of solid proof. I’m not saying that as a negative thing, I think we need those kind of dreamers in the world because academics can be a little stuffy. He ended up getting pushed out of the spotlight by academics as archeology became more specialized and scholarly. Before he disappeared he got into mysticism, followed Madame Blavatsky and let his obsessions take over. The guy is a cautionary tale about what can happen if you go too far down the rabbit hole.
I highly recommend The lost city of Z (movie + book) as well as his own writings if you are into alt history.
FYI: I couldn’t get your link to work OP.