Case Study
Geometry by Design: Contribution of Lidar to the Understanding of Settlement Patterns of the Mound Villages in SW Amazonia
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Abstract
Recent research has shown that the entire southern rim of Amazonia was inhabited by earth-building societies involving landscape engineering, landscape domestication and likely low-density urbanism during the Late Holocene. However, the scale, timing, and intensity of human settlement in this region remain unknown due to the dearth of archaeological work and the logistical difficulties associated with research in tropical forest environments. A case in point are the newly discovered Mound Villages (AD ~1000–1650) in the SE portion of Acre State, Brazil. Much of recent pioneering work on this new archaeological tradition has mainly focused on the excavation of single mounds within sites with little concern for the architectural layout and regional settlement patterns, thus preventing us from understanding how these societies were
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Each settlement is connected across the wider landscape by further straight roads that also radiate out from the center of the villages. Furthermore, the complexity of this design matrix is multiplied ten-fold when we consider that some small groups of villages “exhibit regular distances.” So not only do their locations and alignments reflect cosmic principals, but they also adhere to carefully calculated measurements on the landscape, of “2.5–3 km [1.6–1.9 miles] and 5–6 km [3.1–3.7 miles] between sites,” according to the paper.
Putting this Cosmos in Context
Having now published their initial study, the researchers hope to unveil even more villages hidden beneath the veil of the rainforest, which according to the team were created by a culture that emerged sometime after 950 AD, “when a large geometrically patterned ceremonial earthwork was abandoned.” Out of context this discovery might seem unique, but from a continental perspective it’s really “