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In the Sept. 19, 2003, issue of Science magazine, archeologists from the University of Florida and their colleagues reported their discovery of pre-Columbian remains of a road system that appears to link a network of large villages into a gridlike pattern in the Upper Xingu region of the southern Amazon, in central Brazil.
 Researchers have found evidence of wide, curbed roads, plazas, and managed parkland, indicating that the people who dwelled there dramatically changed their local landscape. These ancestors of the modern-day Xinguanos dug ditches around the villages, built bridges and moats in wetland areas, and cultivated large tracts of land. This dispels the notion that Europeans were the first to cultivate the Amazon area.
Also dispelled is the belief that the environment was too hostile for large-scale human settlement. Indeed, at its height, archeologists estimate that the population of the region numbered in the tens of thousands.
The first written record, from 1884, refers to a subgroup of the Xinguanos, the Kuikuro. But according to their own oral history, the Kuikuro encountered their first Europeans around 1750. After that, the civilization collapsed due to enslavement and disease epidemics. By the 1950s there were as few as 500 Xinguanos.
Michael Heckenberger, the research team leader, reported that they have found nineteen settlements to date, at least four of which were major residential centers. The settlements were built according to the Kuikuro's cosmology. For example, roads and other structures were aligned in the direction of the sun and stars, creating what Heckenberger describes as a kind of "ethnocartography."
Satellite images show regional settlement patterns and large-scale transformations of local landscapes that have taken place over the past millennium. They also reveal that the vegetation now growing in these areas looks quite different from older forest, showing that the affected land has been either cleared or cultivated in the past.
The Upper Xingu is the largest contiguous tract of Amazonian forest still under indigenous management. And the Kuikuro still use many of the remaining bridges, moats and canals where the village sites converged on wetlands.
At issue is how the remaining Amazon will be conserved. As a result of these discoveries, the myth that this area was a pristine wilderness has faded. Should the goal be to preserve a "pristine" wilderness untouched by human activity? Or a working landscape that supports the indigenous peoples?
Perhaps both options can be pursued, for the Amazon rainforest is as varied in its landscape as any other on Earth.
For more information see the MS-NBC Story.
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