Archaeologists find vast network of Amazon villages laid out like the cosmos

By Laura Geggel - Associate Editor 13 minutes ago

Laser and satellite technology revealed more than 35 villages.



Lidar technology revealed long-abandoned villages that look like the rays of a sun.
(Image: © University of Exeter; Iriarte, J, et al. 2020; CC BY 4.0)

Billions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest have detected a vast network of long-abandoned circular and rectangular-shaped villages dating from 1300 to 1700, a new study finds.

The round villages all had remarkably similar layouts, with elongated mounds circling a central plaza, like marks on a clock.

"These latter elongated mounds, when seen from above, look like the rays of the sun, which gives them the common name of 'Sóis,'" the Portuguese word for "suns," the researchers wrote in the study.

The discovery is part of a new archaeological focus on the pre-Columbian Amazon. Within the past 20 years, researchers have learned that the rainforest's southern rim was home to a great diversity of soil-sculpting cultures that engineered the landscape before the Europeans arrived. Within the past decade, scientists have uncovered the remnants of so-called "mound villages," which are shaped as circles or rectangles, and connected by road networks.

Archaeologists, however, had yet to look for mound villages in the Brazilian state of Acre, so an international group of researchers teamed up to survey the area with lidar — or light detection and ranging. With this technique, billions of lasers shot from overhead (in this case, from a helicopter) penetrate the rainforest's canopy and map the landscape below.

More:
https://www.livescience.com/clock-face-shaped-villages-amazon-rainforest.html