And thanks to Blam for starting this topic.A rain forest debate: Could it have been home to complex societies?On some of the sites, several square miles of earth are packed with millions of potsherds. The archeologists also cite evidence of giant plazas, bridges and roads, complete with curbs, and defensive ditches that would have taken armies of workers to construct.
by Marion Lloyd
Boston Globe
January 4, 2005
The earliest signs of large, sedentary populations appear to coincide with the beginnings of terra preta. ''Something happened 2,500 years ago, and we don't know what," said Eduardo Neves, a Brazilian archeologist at the Federal University of So Paulo, who is codirector of the Central Amazon Project.
Scientists are working to determine whether terra preta, which contains high levels of organic matter and carbon, came about by accident or was the product of a deliberate effort to improve upon the notoriously poor rain-forest soil.
The research into terra preta fuels a ''revisionist school" of scientists who argue that the pre-Columbian Amazon was not a pristine wilderness, but a heavily managed forest teeming with human beings. They theorize that advanced societies existed in the region from before the time of Christ until a century after the European conquest in the 1500s decimated Amerindian populations through exploitation and disease. The theory also is supported by the accounts of the first Europeans to travel the length of the Amazon River in 1542. They reported human settlements with thousands of people stretching for many miles along the river banks.
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