Archaeologists have found traces of the presence of about a million people in the supposedly "deserted" southwestern part of the Amazon, representatives of a kind of "lost tribe" of Indians who lived there before the invasion of the conquistadors, according to an article published in the journal Nature Communications.
“We are incredibly happy that we were able to find so many traces of human presence in the forests in the south of the region. No excavations have ever taken place here before, and our research shows that we need to completely rethink the history of the Amazon region. Only in the small part of it, which we studied, lived at least several tens of thousands of people, - said Jose Iriarte (Jose Iriarte) from the University of Exeter (UK).
The southern coast of the Amazon, as scientists say, has long been considered a kind of natural reserve, where people have never lived permanently. Archaeologists assumed that the tribes of the ancient Indians preferred to live in the floodplain of the river, and not in the vicinity of its tributaries, the banks of which are often swampy, deprived of food and other resources.
Relatively recently, scientists discovered several large canals, giant geoglyphs and other man-made structures near the borders of Colombia and Brazil, which indicated the presence of humans in the "uninhabited" forests of the Amazon. This find challenged generally accepted theories.
British and Brazilian archaeologists have checked whether this is in fact, in parallel investigating one of the strange stories that was mentioned in the Brazilian chronicles of the 18th century. Monks and naturalists of that time wrote that one of the regions of the southern Amazon, the basin of the Tapajos River, was densely populated by Indians. Today, almost no one lives here, this made scientists doubt such statements by the chroniclers.
Remains of settlements found by archaeologists in the “ deserted ” forests of the Amazon.
Archaeologists checked whether this is so by illuminating the ground in the vicinity of this river using radars installed on board aircraft and satellites. They managed to find several hundred structures similar in shape to man-made objects - canals, ditches and other structures - which forced Iriarte and his colleagues to make an expedition to those parts of the river basin where they were most often encountered.
In total, archaeologists managed to unearth more than a hundred such structures, and find, inside or near them, quite unambiguous traces of human life - fragments of pottery, stone axes and a special type of soil that forms only in human settlements.
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Some of these structures, as scientists note, had a very clear meaning. For example, circular ditches protected the settlements of the "lost tribe" of the Indians from wild animals and attacks from other people. Larger and longer canals, stretching for several tens of kilometers, still remain a mystery to historians.
In total, in the southern Amazon region, as the calculations of Iriarte and his colleagues show, there were about 1.3 thousand similar settlements of ancient Indians who lived in this region of the continent for at least several hundred years, from the 12th century to the 15th century AD.
The total number of representatives of this mysterious group of Indians, according to archaeologists, could exceed a million people, which poses a completely logical question for them - where did all these people disappear, and why did no one know about their existence before? Further excavations, scientists hope, will help reveal these mysteries of history.