Ancient Amazon Cities Found; Were Vast Urban Network

John Roach
for National Geographic News

August 28, 2008

Dozens of ancient, densely packed, towns, villages, and hamlets arranged in an organized pattern have been mapped in the Brazilian Amazon, anthropologists announced today.

The finding suggests that vast swathes of "pristine" rain forest may actually have been sophisticated urban landscapes prior to the arrival of European colonists.

"It is very different from what we might expect using certain classic models of urbanism," noted study co-author Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Nevertheless, he said, the repeated patterns within and among settlements across the landscape suggest a highly ordered and planned society on par with any medieval European town.

The finding supports a controversial theory that the Amazon River Basin teemed with large societies that were all but obliterated by disease when European colonists arrived in the 15th and 16th centuries.

The isolated tribes that remain in the Amazon today are the last survivors of these once great societies, according to the theory.

If this theory is correct, the networked structure of the ancient settlements may lend insight to better protect and manage the indigenous populations and forests that remain in the Amazon today, scientists said.

Heckenberger and his colleagues from the U.S. and Brazil—including a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian tribe—report their finding today in the journal Science.

Urban Plan

In 1993, Heckenberger lived with the Kuikuro near the headwaters of the Xingu River. Within two weeks of his stay, he learned about the ancient settlements and began a 15-year effort to study and map them in detail.

So far he has identified at least two major clusters—or polities—of towns, villages, and hamlets. Each cluster contains a central seat of ritualistic power with wide roads radiating out to other communities.

Each settlement is organized around a central plaza and linked to others via precisely placed roads. In their heyday, some of the settlements were home to perhaps thousands of people and were about 150 acres (61 hectares) in size.

A major road aligned with the summer solstice intersects each central plaza.

The larger towns, placed at cardinal points from the central seat of power, were walled much like a medieval town, noted Heckenberger. Smaller villages and hamlets were less well defined.

Between the settlements, which today are almost completely overgrown, was a patchwork of agricultural fields for crops such as manioc along with dams and ponds likely used for fish farms.

"The whole landscape is almost like a latticework, the way it is gridded off," Heckenberger said. "The individual centers themselves are much less constructed. It is more patterned at the regional level."

At their height between A.D. 1250 and 1650, the clusters may have housed around 50,000 people, the scientists noted.

According to Heckenberger, the planned structure of these settlements is indicative of the regional planning and political organization that are hallmarks of urban society.

"These are far more planned at the regional level than your average medieval town," he said, noting that rural landscapes in medieval settlements were randomly oriented.

"Here things are oriented at the same angles and distances across the entire landscape."

"Garden Cities"

The research "raises huge and important questions," Susan Hecht, an Amazon specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, was quoted saying in a related Science news piece written by Charles Mann.

Mann is the author of the 2005 book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which describes theories of urban planning in the Amazon.

For one, Hecht was quoted as saying, the research adds further weight to the idea that the Amazon Basin once supported large and complex societies.

Other scientists, notably archaeologist Betty Meggers at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., have argued that Amazonian soils were too poor to support large human populations for extended periods.

Hecht said the research also challenges the idea that urbanism means a central, dominant, and powerful city. Smaller, but highly connected settlements may also have been common.

According to study co-author Heckenberger, the clusters of towns in the pre-Columbian Amazon were similar to the system envisioned by British planner Ebenezer Howard in his 1902 book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow.

Howard argued for a system of tightly linked smaller cities instead of large megacities that are an eyesore on the natural world.

"If [he] knew about Xingu, it would have been a chapter in his book," Heckenberger said.

And now that the Amazonian "garden cities" have been found, Heckenberger added, scientists and planners ought to study them closely for alternatives to the modern system that is destroying vast reaches of the Amazon and displacing the last of the region's indigenous tribes.

"We know that we have to come up with alternatives," he said, "so here is a place we may want to look."

Maya Water World

By Priit J. Vesilind Photographs by Wes Skiles

Divers and scientists probe Yucatán sinkholes, sacred to the Maya, where human sacrifices ensured cosmic order.


On the third day it was my turn to test God's vigilance, letting the metal chair plop me down into the cool pond like a piece of bait. Treading water, I adjusted my eyes to the moonlight of the cave. The cenote was shaped like an old Chianti bottle—a narrow neck leading to a wide chamber about 90 feet (30 meters) across and 120 feet (40 meters) deep. The bottle was half full, the water surface 35 feet (11 meters) below the domed ceiling. Stalactites dripped, and the roots of trees were spread on the walls in delicate dark webbing. Spanish records tell how live victims were thrown into the sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá, a major Maya city, on the premise that, as sacrifices to the gods, they would not die—even though they were never seen again. I scanned the slick limestone walls, and my heart pounded, feeling their terror.

Sinking deeper into the white noise of pressure, I bottomed out at 50 feet (20 meters) and glided across piles of shattered limestone. A side cave, shaped like a sock, spun down and off to the west. Resting in the sand was a mahogany-hued skeleton, already tagged, the eye orbits of its skull bleak with expectations of eternity.
A few days later the National Institute of Anthropology and History scientists brought him up. It was the first skeleton of its kind—with all its bones in their natural positions, undisturbed—ever found underwater in the Yucatán. He was a large man, perhaps 50 years old, well past the Maya life expectancy. "His health was bad," said Terrazas after examining the bones, "with arthritis so severe that he could barely flex his hands. He had terrible teeth problems—gingivitis—and he probably had a very hard time chewing."

He was lying face up on the sand. Was it an accident? "No," said Terrazas. "There are nine skeletons down there [eight are partial]. Maybe one is there from an accident, but not nine."
When the car winch pulled up the bones of the old man, the three women who had made quesadillas for us the previous night were standing by the well. I asked them what they thought of our mission. "We didn't expect skeletons," said one, Olegaria Chiku. "For us, a cenote is just a hole with water. But my mother lived around here, and she said that we needed to give the cenote 15 virgins, and God would open up a road to bring in the gold that we know is down there."

Until the 1960s many people, including many archaeologists, thought virgins were the only individuals whose stories had ended in the cenotes. "We learned then that they were not all young girls," said Carmen Rojas, the underwater archaeologist who oversees data processing for the survey project. "And now we know that they were not all sacrifices."

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Ancient Artifacts and Symbols

The Siva Linga
The Siva Linga is a revered symbol of Shiva, the Hindu god who destroys the universe so that it can be recreated. The Siva Linga (or Lingam) occupies a prominent place of worship in all temples of Shiva, and its phallic nature represents the god's power of creation. During the annual Mahashivratri festival the faithful ritualistically bathe and decorate Siva Linga.
Much of the action in the Hollywood movie Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom centers around Indy's hunt for the "Sankara stones," five artifacts loosely based on the Siva Linga.



Anubis Mural
Jackal-headed Anubis, a divine protector of the dead, is typically found in burial chambers. This Egyptian god guided souls to the afterlife by overseeing the embalming process. Anubis also performed the judgment of the dead by weighing the deceased's heart to learn whether the sum of his deeds had been for good or ill.
In Raiders of the Lost Ark, an enormous Anubis statue adorns the fictional Well of Souls in Tanis, Egypt, the sacred room where the Ark of the Covenant lies hidden.



Aztec Sun Stone
This massive 24-ton ceremonial stone celebrates the sun god Tonatiuh, whose visage anchors the stone at its center. Tonatiuh demanded human sacrifice, and his knifelike tongue symbolizes the instruments once used to slice open the chests of those sacrificed to him.
Carved in the 15th century, the Sun Stone also portrays the cyclical Aztec view of time. It charts the recurring days and years of the Aztec calendar—including the ends of four ancient epochs during which the world was destroyed by jaguars, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions, and torrential rainstorms.
Discovered in 1790, the Sun Stone now resides at Mexico's National Museum of Anthropology.



Tlazolteotl Fertility Idol
Tlazolteotl was a complex goddess venerated by several Mesoamerican cultures, including the Aztec. She is recognizable as a distinctive, bare-breasted female.
Tlazolteotl was a fertility deity associated with the Earth and with human fertility through sex, childbirth, and motherhood. She also represented carnal sin and performed the cleansing of such vice by "eating" the sins confessed to her by the dying.
In the opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones nabs a golden fertility idol based on Tlazolteotl from an ancient Mesoamerican cave.



Eye of Horus
This familiar symbol appears in many examples of Egyptian art. The eye likely originated with one of the most ancient Egyptian goddesses, Wadjet, who subsequently lent her name to the symbol. Wadjet was a solar goddess, and the sun remained associated with the symbol when it became known as the Eye of Horus, falcon god of the sky.
The symbol is also known as the Eye of Ra, Egypt's sun god of a later period. The eye was used as a protective or healing talisman and was often found on elaborate jewelry.



Ankh
The ankh is a symbol of life often shown in the hands of Egyptian gods or pharaohs. The gods are sometimes depicted giving the ankh, and thus giving life, to a human.
The origins of this widespread symbol are much disputed. Whatever its original symbolic meaning (theories range from a sandal loop to a sunrise) the ankh was widely adopted first by Egyptian religions and later by early Christians for whom it linked the cross with eternal life.



Easter Island Heads
Easter Island's stone statues, or moai, tell no tales and offer few clues about why—and how—they came to stand sentinel on this remote speck of island. The area's first inhabitants completed an incredible journey to settle an island some 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers) from Tahiti and 2,300 miles (3,700 kilometers) from the coast of Chile.
On Easter Island these ancient peoples created nearly 900 hardened-ash statues, averaging 13 feet (4 meters) high and 13 tons, and moved many of them around the island. Because little oral history and no written records have survived from this period, their purpose remains one of the world's most compelling mysteries.



Terra-Cotta Warriors
For more than 2,200 years the terra-cotta army has silently guarded the grave of the great First Emperor Qin, during whose ruthless reign China was first united.
The incredible array of unique warriors and horses, equipped with chariots and weapons, was hidden until 1974. In that year peasants digging a well near the ancient Chinese capital of Xi'an made one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.
Today work continues at the site, where as many as 8,000 life-size warriors could finally emerge from the Chinese soil.

(http://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/ancient/artifacts-symbols.html#terra-cotta)

Portal to Maya Underworld Found in Mexico?

Alexis Okeowo in México City
for National Geographic News
August 22, 2008

A labyrinth filled with stone temples and pyramids in 14 caves—some underwater—have been uncovered on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula, archaeologists announced last week.
The discovery has experts wondering whether Maya legend inspired the construction of the underground complex—or vice versa.
According to Maya myth, the souls of the dead had to follow a dog with night vision on a horrific and watery path and endure myriad challenges before they could rest in the afterlife.
In one of the recently found caves, researchers discovered a nearly 300-foot (90-meter) concrete road that ends at a column standing in front of a body of water.
"We have this pattern now of finding temples close to the water—or under the water, in this most recent case," said Guillermo de Anda, lead investigator at the research sites.
"These were probably made as part of a very elaborate ritual," de Anda said. "Everything is related to death, life, and human sacrifice."
Stretching south from southern Mexico, through Guatemala, and into northern Belize, the Maya culture had its heyday from about A.D. 250 to 900, when the civilization mysteriously collapsed.
(Read about the watery graves of the Maya in National Geographic magazine.)
Myth and Reality
Archaeologists excavating the temples and pyramids in the village of Tahtzibichen, in Mérida, the capital of Yucatán state, said the oldest item they found was a 1,900-year-old vessel. Other uncovered earthenware and sculptures dated to A.D. 750 to 850.
"There are stones, huge columns, and sculptures of priests in the caves," said de Anda, whose team has been working on the Yucatán Peninsula for six months.
"There are also human remains and ceramics," he said.
Researchers said the ancient legend—described in part in the sacred book Popul Vuh—tell of a tortuous journey through oozing blood, bats, and spiders, that souls had to make in order to reach Xibalba, the underworld.
"Caves are natural portals to other realms, which could have inspired the Mayan myth. They are related to darkness, to fright, and to monsters," de Anda said, adding that this does not contradict the theory that the myth inspired the temples.
William Saturno, a Maya expert at Boston University, believes the maze of temples was built after the story.
"I'm sure the myths came first, and the caves reaffirmed the broad time-and-space myths of the Mayans," he said.
Underworld Entrances
Saturno said the discovery of the temples underwater indicates the significant effort the Maya put into creating these portals.
In addition to plunging deep into the forest to reach the cave openings, Maya builders would have had to hold their breath and dive underwater to build some of the shrines and pyramids.
Other Maya underworld entrances have been discovered in jungles and aboveground caves in northern Guatemala Belize.
"They believed in a reality with many layers," Saturno said of the Maya. "The portal between life and where the dead go was important to them."

(National Geographic News)