© Wikipedia CommonsA megalithic stone circle in Brazil hints that the indigenous people of the Amazon may have been more sophisticated than previously thought.
Calcoene, 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.
Comment: The precise number of victims from Operation Condor is unknown, as these actions were all illegal and hidden. However, it is estimated that about 50,000 people were murdered or disappeared (among them 3,000 children) and 400,000 people were imprisoned.
See also: