Foto aérea de los yacimientos arqueológicos: las líneas rojas señalan los caminos y las fortificaciones, y las negras las zanjas que marcan la presencia de los geoglifos. Science/AAAS.

No se trata del mítico El Dorado, ni de la enésima ciudad perdida de los Incas, pero aunque sus calles no estén pavimentadas de oro, la red urbana descubierta en plena selva amazónica cambiará nuestra visión de las culturas precolombinas y de los modelos urbanísticos pergeñados por la humanidad en la interacción con el medio ambiente. El hallazgo barre con la idea de una 'selva virgen' y en su lugar propone una forma de cultura urbana /selvática de la cual podemos sacar enseñanzas en materia de desarrollo sostenible.

Vía: PABLO FRANCESCUTTI | SOITU.ES, 29 de agosto de 2008

Las ruinas se ubican en la región del Alto Xingu (centro-sureste brasileño). Los primeros indicios se encontraron en 1977, cuando un estudiante de Geografía realizaba un censo arqueológico en el estado de Acre y dio con unos curiosos túmulos de tierra que la tala de árboles había dejado al descubierto. Ulteriores prospecciones con fotografías aéreas identificaron un gran número de túmulos de forma circular, hexagonal y romboidal, denominados "geoglifos", comparables con las célebres figuras de Nazca.

Las pesquisas condujeron a la ciudad de los kuikuro, una tribu de la etnia xinguano. Hablando con propiedad, la "urbe" consiste en un racimo de poblados amurallados, organizados en torno a plazas ceremoniales, interconectados por una red de calzadas y geoglifos de posible función hidráulica (gestión del agua en la estación seca). Esta sociedad jerárquica de unos 50.000 miembros, basada en una compleja planificación territorial, alcanzó su cénit entre los años 1250 y 1650, anunciaron en 2003 el arqueólogo estadounidense Michael Heckenbergery y Afukaka, su colaborador kuikuro. Para variar, el derrumbe lo produjo el contacto con los europeos, o mejor dicho, con su avanzadilla: las legiones de microbios del Viejo Mundo que precedían su avance.

Los nuevos descubrimientos comunicados por Heckenberger en la presente edición de 'Science' han refutado la creencia dominante en arqueología acerca de la imposibilidad de sociedades populosas y relativamente cultas en un entorno señalado por suelos pobres, rigores climatológicos y escasez de proteínas animales. En tales condiciones, se pensaba, solo podían medrar bandas de cazadores-recolectores, recluidas en las vegas de los ríos. La selva amazónica, se deducía, era totalmente virgen.

Esa virginidad se ha perdido, a tenor de los últimos hallazgos (se han localizado geoglifos con una antigüedad de ¡4.500 años!). La visión de una prístina tierra de nadie cede lugar al panorama de un ecosistema de humedales en el que flora, fauna y Homo sapiens encontraron un modus vivendi. Los indios construyeron embalses y lagunas artificiales con las que aprovechaban las inundaciones estacionales para atrapar peces. Posiblemente, domesticaron cultivos como el cacahuete, la guindilla, la yuca, el tabaco, el cacao o el palmito. A ellos se debería la invención de la terra preta, la feraz capa de tierra negra que contrasta con el suelo rojizo y semiestéril de la Amazonia, y a la que crearon añadiendo a la tierra una mezcla de carbón vegetal y hollín, generadora de una intensa actividad microbiana que aseguraba un alta fertilidad durante largo tiempo.

* Artículo relacionado: "SOLOS DE TERRA PRETA PODEM SER SOLUÇÃO PARA A AGRICULTURA NA AMAZÔNIA"

Se estima que los geoglifos conocidos representan apenas la décima parte de los existentes en la cuenca amazónica. Cuando se hayan estudiado todos, quizás se demuestre que las culturas locales –las "pobres" del mundo precolombino- tuvieron un papel decisivo en la génesis de la agricultura americana y de civilizaciones aledañas como el imperio incaico. Por lo pronto, ya han refutado la premisa de que "el urbanismo actual, con su hiperconcentración, es la norma histórica", apunta Susanna Hecht, experta de la Universidad de California, Los Angeles. "Las aglomeraciones menores que interactuaban con los bosques y la agricultura pueden haber sido más frecuentes de lo que pensábamos", agrega. "Dada la complejidad de los regímenes hídricos y bióticos de la Amazonia, un modelo descentralizado podría haberse adaptado mejor a un medio dominado por la presencia de grandes volúmenes de agua".

Ancient Urban Network Mapped in Amazon Forests
By: John Roach for National Geographic News.

Photo: Lines mapped from village earthworks radiate outward from the central power seat in the southernmost of two recently identified clusters of ancient Amazon towns. Dozens of densely packed, pre-Columbian towns, villages, and hamlets arranged in an organized pattern have been mapped in the Brazilian Amazon, anthropologists announced in late August 2008. Map courtesy Science/AAAS.

'Pristine' Amazonian region hosted large, urban civilization, study...

Contact: Mike Heckenberger
mheck@ufl.edu
01-155-113-141-3000
University of Florida

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- They aren't the lost cities early explorers sought fruitlessly to discover.

But ancient settlements in the Amazon, now almost entirely obscured by tropical forest, were once large and complex enough to be considered "urban" as the term is commonly applied to both medieval European and ancient Greek communities.

So says a paper set to appear Friday in Science co-authored by anthropologists from the University of Florida and Brazil, and a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian people who are the descendants of the settlements' original inhabitants.

"If we look at your average medieval town or your average Greek polis, most are about the scale of those we find in this part of the Amazon," said Mike Heckenberger, a UF professor of anthropology and the lead author of the paper. "Only the ones we find are much more complicated in terms of their planning."

The paper also argues that the size and scale of the settlements in the southern Amazon in North Central Brazil means that what many scientists have considered virgin tropical forests are in fact heavily influenced by historic human activity. Not only that, but the settlements – consisting of networks of walled towns and smaller villages, each organized around a central plaza – suggest future solutions for supporting the indigenous population in Brazil's state of Mato Grosso and other regions of the Amazon, the paper says.

Índios Kuikuro preservam tradições com o uso da tecnologia


"Some of the practices that these folks hammered may provide alternative forms of understanding how to do low level sustainable development today," Heckenberger said.

Heckenberger and his colleagues first announced the discovery of the settlements in a 2003 Science paper. The largest date from around 1250 to 1650, when European colonists and the diseases they brought likely killed most of their inhabitants.

The Kuikuro village of Ipatse (Photo by Pedro Martinelli/ISA, 1999). The communities are now almost entirely overgrown. But Heckenberger said that members of the Kuikuro, a Xinguano tribe that calls the region home, are adept at identifying telltale landscape features that reveal ancient activity. These include, for example, "dark earth" that indicate past human waste dumps or farming, concentrations of pottery shards and earthworks. Also assisted by satellite imagery and GPS technology, the researchers spent more than a decade uncovering and mapping the obscured communities.
The new paper reports that the settlements consisted of clusters of 150-acre towns and smaller villages organized in spread out "galactic" patterns.

None of the large towns was as large as the largest medieval or Greek towns. But as with those towns, the Amazonian ones were surrounded by large walls – in their case, composed of earthworks still extant today. Among other repeated features, each Amazonian settlement had an identical formal road, always oriented northeast to southwest in keeping with the mid-year summer solstice, connected to a central plaza.

The careful placement of the like-oriented settlements is indicative of the regional planning and political organization that are hallmarks of urban society, Heckenberger said.

"These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns," he said.

The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that "if you find it in Europe, it's a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else," Heckenberger said.

"They have quite remarkable planning and self-organization, more so than many classical examples of what people would call urbanism," he said.

But the research is also important because it means at least one area of "pristine" Amazon has a history of human activity. That could change not only how scientists assess the flora and fauna, but also how conservationists approach preserving the remains of forest so heavily cleared it is the world's largest soybean producing area. "This throws a wrench in all the models suggesting we are looking at primordial biodiversity," Heckenberger said.

Around the communities the scientists found dams and artificial ponds that indicate inhabitants farmed fish near their homes. They also found the remnants of open areas and large compost heaps suggesting widespread near-town cultivation.

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The research has been funded by the National Science Foundation.