The "untouched" Amazon rainforest often pictured in nature documentaries as an empty, unbroken expanse of forest, was in fact home to planned settlements centuries before European contact. Archaeologist Jonas Gregorio de Souza and colleagues reported this in a 2018 Nature Communications article, "Pre-Columbian earth-builders settled along the entire southern rim of the Amazon." Using satellite imagery, the team identified 81 previously unmapped archaeological sites in the Amazon, revealing fortified villages and ceremonial earthworks built around the early-to-mid 1400s, in the closing decades of Europe's medieval period. This finding adds to a body of evidence, built up over a series of studies in recent years, that the Amazon was not the empty wilderness of popular imagination but a landscape that supported dense, complex societies.
What the satellites actually picked up on under the canopy
The team of archaeologists in the Nature Communications article studied the Upper Tapajós Basin, a place previously thought to have few archaeological sites due to the region's lack of prior exploration, and found 81 different sites containing 104 individual earthworks (several sites contained more than one structure) made by people who constructed geometric enclosures, circular and square ones among them, meant to serve as ceremonial or defensive structures. According to a 2018 summary of the study by Smithsonian Magazine, 24 of the chosen excavation sites had stone tools, pottery, sunken roads, house platforms, and darkened, nutrient-rich soil known as terra preta, which was used as fertilizer and is evidence that there had been a large human settlement in the area.
