CALÇOENE,
Brazil — As the foreman for a cattle ranch in the far reaches of the
Brazilian Amazon, Lailson Camelo da Silva was razing trees to convert
rain forest into pasture when he stumbled across a bizarre arrangement
of towering granite blocks.
“I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon’s own Stonehenge,”
said Mr. da Silva, 65, on a scorching October day as he gazed at the
archaeological site located just north of the Equator. “It makes me
wonder: What other secrets about our past are still hidden in Brazil’s jungles?”
After
conducting radiocarbon testing and carrying out measurements during the
winter solstice, scholars in the field of archaeoastronomy determined
that an indigenous culture arranged the megaliths into an astronomical
observatory about 1,000 years ago, or five centuries before the European
conquest of the Americas began.
Their findings, along with other archaeological discoveries in Brazil in recent years — including giant land carvings, remains of fortified settlements and even complex road networks
— are upending earlier views of archaeologists who argued that the
Amazon had been relatively untouched by humans except for small, nomadic
tribes.
Instead,
some scholars now assert that the world’s largest tropical rain forest
was far less “Edenic” than previously imagined, and that the Amazon
supported a population of as many as 10 million people before the epidemics and large-scale slaughter put into motion by European colonizers.
In
what is now the sparsely populated state of Amapá in northern Brazil,
the sun stones found by Mr. da Silva near a stream called the Rego
Grande are yielding clues about how indigenous peoples in the Amazon may
have been far more sophisticated than assumed by archaeologists in the
20th century.
“We’re
starting to piece together the puzzle of the Amazon Basin’s human
history, and what we’re finding in Amapá is absolutely fascinating,”
said Mariana Cabral, an archaeologist at the Federal University of Minas
Gerais, who together with her husband, João Saldanha, also an
archaeologist, has studied the Rego Grande site for the last decade.
Back in the late 19th century, the Swiss zoologist Emílio Goeldi had spotted megaliths — large monumental stones — on an expedition through Brazil’s frontier with French Guiana. Other scholars, including the pioneering
American archaeologist Betty Meggers, also came across such sites, but
argued that the Amazon was inhospitable to complex human settlements.
It
was not until Mr. da Silva, the former ranch foreman, came across the
stones at Rego Grande while deforesting surrounding jungle in the 1990s
that scholars focused greater attention on the findings. Mr. da Silva
said he first stumbled on the site while hunting wild boar as a teenager
in the 1960s, but had subsequently avoided the area.
“The
place initially felt sacred, like we didn’t belong here,” said Mr. da
Silva, who now guards the Rego Grande site as its custodian. “But it was
impossible to miss it during the deforestation drive of the ’90s, when
the priority was to burn down trees.”
About
10 years ago, after securing public funds to cordon off the stones,
Brazilian archaeologists led by Ms. Cabral and Mr. Saldanha began
excavating the site, which is shaped roughly like a circle. They soon
identified a portion of a river about two miles away where the granite
blocks may have been quarried.
They
also found ceramic burial urns, suggesting that at least part of the
Rego Grande site may have been a cemetery, while colleagues from Amapá’s
Institute of Scientific and Technological Research discovered that one
of the tall stones seemed to be aligned with the sun’s path during the winter solstice.
After
identifying other points in the site where stones could be associated
with the sun’s movement on the solstice, the researchers began piecing
together a theory that Rego Grande could have served various ceremonial
and astronomical functions connected to agricultural or hunting cycles.
Ms.
Cabral said that Rego Grande and a series of other less elaborate
megalithic sites found in Amapá may have also served as markers for
hunters or fishermen on a landscape that was being transformed by
Amazonian peoples a millennium ago.
Still,
other scholars say that more information may be needed about Rego
Grande to lift it into the realm of prehistoric places clearly conceived
for astronomical observations.
“We’ve
seen a lot of similar claims, but it takes more than a circle of
standing stones to get to a Stonehenge,” said Jarita Holbrook, a scholar
of physics and cultural astronomy at the University of the Western Cape
in South Africa, citing the need for more findings about Rego Grande’s
characteristics and how the site was used by the people who built it.
For
now, Rego Grande, which local people already call the Amazonian
Stonehenge, remains enigmatic. Pottery shards jut through the soil as if
offering tantalizing clues around the place, which has the feel of a
contemporary conceptual art piece. Researchers are still trying to
determine how Rego Grande fits into the evolving views on the Amazon’s
human history.
Representatives
of the Palikur, an indigenous people living in Amapá and French Guiana,
have recently stepped forward to say that their ancestors had
frequented Rego Grande. Still, archaeologists express caution about
establishing such links, emphasizing how much can change in human
societies over the span of a thousand years.
Ms.
Cabral, the archaeologist who has spent years studying Rego Grande,
said that evidence of large settlements remains elusive, in contrast
with other sites in the Amazon like Kuhikugu, at the headwaters of the
Xingu River, where researchers have drawn parallels to the legends surrounding the mythical Lost City of Z, long an irresistible lure for explorers and adventurers.
Either
way, John McKim Malville, a solar physicist at the University of
Colorado who writes extensively on archaeoastronomy, emphasized how the
field is moving away from focusing exclusively on astronomical functions
to interpretations that are more holistic, by including the ceremonies
and rituals of ancient cultures.
In that sense, the site in Calçoene offers a beguiling if cryptic glimpse into Amazonia’s past.
“The
stones of Rego Grande are quite extraordinary and in their irregularity
may have their own unique meaning, different from other megalithic
sites around the world,” Mr. Malville said, raising the possibility that
Rego Grande reflects the importance in Amazonian cultures of animism,
the attribution of a soul to entities in nature and even inanimate
objects.
He added, “We can only speculate what its stones mean.”
Correction: December 14, 2016
An earlier version of the headline with this article misspelled the name of the circular stone monument in England that the megaliths in Brazil are being compared to. It is Stonehenge, not Stonhenge.
An earlier version of the headline with this article misspelled the name of the circular stone monument in England that the megaliths in Brazil are being compared to. It is Stonehenge, not Stonhenge.
Correction: December 16, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of a scholar at the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. She is Jarita Holbrook, not Jovita. And it misstated, at one point, the surname of a physicist at the University of Colorado. As noted correctly elsewhere in the article, he is John McKim Malville, not Melville.
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