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RIO DE JANEIRO (AFP) - Archaeologists discovered a pre-colonial astrological observatory possibly 2,000 years old in the Amazon basin near French Guiana, said a report. "Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a monument," archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral, of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (IEPA), told O Globo newspaper. The observatory was built of 127 blocks of granite each three meters (10 feet) high and regularly placed in circles in an open field, she said. Cabral said the site resembles a temple which could have been used as an observatory, because the blocks...

Brazilian archaeologists have found an ancient stone structure in a remote corner of the Amazon that may cast new light on the region's past. The site, thought to be an observatory or place of worship, pre-dates European colonisation and is said to suggest a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy. Its appearance is being compared to the English site of Stonehenge. It was traditionally thought that before European colonisation, the Amazon had no advanced societies. Winter solstice The archaeologists made the discovery in the state of Amapa, in the far north of Brazil. A total of 127 large blocks of stone were...

Bird’s-Eye View of the Amazon Airborne Archaeologist Challenges the Myth of a Pristine Wilderness by Ted Mann In the office of a typical archaeologist, you would expect to find things like stone tools, pottery fragments, and maybe even a few Wooly Mammoth bones. But Clark Erickson is no typical archaeologist. Oversize rolls of aerial photographs are stacked into tubular pyramids on a desk and worktable in his University Museum office. They fill up file cabinets and populate a storage room. At last count, he had about 700 giant aerial and satellite images—almost all of them picturing some region of the...

Contact: Lynda Majarian lynda.majarian@uvm.edu 802-656-1107 University of Vermont Rainforest researchers hit pay dirt It shouldn't be there, but it is. Deep in the central Amazonian rainforest lies a rich, black soil known locally as terra preta do Indio (Indian dark earth) that farmers have worked for years with minimal fertilization. A Brazilian-American archeological team believed terra preta, which may cover 10 percent of Amazonia, was the product of intense habitation by Amerindian populations who flourished in the area for two millennia, but they recently unearthed evidence that societies lived and farmed in the area up to 11,000 years ago. As...

DISCOVER Vol. 23 No. 5 (May 2002)Table of Contents The Amazon Trail Anna Roosevelt's ventures into the jungles of South America have turned up traces of human settlements far older than archaeologists ever suspected By John Dorfman Photography by Jennifer Tzar Archaeologists visiting remote sites in Brazil must rely on the skills of local pilots to locate—and land on—small airstrips in the rain forest. "The pilots here are very good," says Roosevelt, a veteran Amazon explorer, because the mining industry depends on them. "When I have a goal," says Anna Curtenius Roosevelt, her voice emphasizing the word, "everything else is...

Previously unknown archeological sites in forest islands reveal human presence in the western Amazon as early as 10,000 years ago, according to research published August 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Umberto Lombardo from the University of Bern, Switzerland and colleagues from other institutions. The study focuses on a region in the Bolivian Amazon thought to be rarely occupied by pre-agricultural communities due to unfavorable environmental conditions. Hundreds of 'forest islands'- small forested mounds of earth- are found throughout the region, their origins attributed to termites, erosion or ancient human activity. In this study, the authors report...

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines. Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands. The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that...

Many botanists did not see any connection between maize and other living plants. Some concluded that the crop plant arose through the domestication by early agriculturalists of a wild maize that was now extinct, or at least undiscovered. However, a few scientists working during the first part of the 20th century uncovered evidence that they believed linked maize to what, at first glance, would seem to be a very unlikely parent, a Mexican grass called teosinte... George W. Beadle, while a graduate student at Cornell University in the early 1930s, found that maize and teosinte had very similar chromosomes....

Centuries-old European explorers' tales of lost cities in the Amazon have long been dismissed by scholars, in part because the region is too infertile to feed a sprawling civilization. But new discoveries support the idea of an ancient Amazonian urban network—and ingeniously engineered soil may have made it all possible.

Amazonian find stuns researchers Deep in the Amazon forest of Brazil, archaeologists have found a network of 1,000-year-old towns and villages that refutes two long-held notions: that the pre-Columbian tropical rain forest was a pristine environment that had not been altered by humans, and that the rain forest could not support a complex, sophisticated society. A 15-mile-square region at the headwaters of the Xingu River contains at least 19 villages that are sited at regular intervals and share the same circular design. The villages are connected by a system of broad, parallel highways, Florida researchers reported in yesterday's issue of...

One way to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is to put it back in the ground. In the first of two News Features on carbon sequestration, Quirin Schiermeier asked when the world's coal-fired power plants will start storing away their carbon. In the second, Emma Marris joins the enthusiasts who think that enriching Earth's soils with charcoal can help avert global warming, reduce the need for fertilizers, and greatly increase the size of turnips. J. LEHMANN Drop of the black stuff: terra preta contrasts strongly with normal soil in colour (above) and produces much more vigorous crops (below)....

ST. LOUIS -- The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe's richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground. That's not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soil -- known as terra preta, or Amazonian dark earths -- and say it can pull substantial amounts of carbon out of the increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere, helping to prevent global warming. That's because terra preta is loaded with...