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 organised at the regional level. To address these shortcomings, we carried out the first Lidar survey with a RIEGL VUX-1 UAV Lidar sensor integrated into an MD 500 helicopter. Our novel results documented distinctive architectural features of Circular Mound Villages such as the presence of ranked, paired, cardinally oriented, sunken roads interconnecting villages, the occurrence of a diversity of mound shapes within sites, as well as the exposure the superimposition of villages. Site size distribution analysis showed no apparent signs of settlement hierarchy. At the same time, it revealed that some small groups of villages positioned along streams exhibit regular distances of 2.5–3 km and 5–6 km between sites. Our data show that after the cessation of Geoglyph construction (~AD 950), this region of SW Amazonia was not abandoned, but occupied by a flourishing regional system of Mound Villages. The results continue to call into question traditional views that portray interfluvial areas and the western sector of Amazonia as sparsely inhabited. A brief discussion of our findings in the context with pre-Columbian settlement patterns across other regions of Amazonia is conducted.
Highlights
Earthen architecture featuring a wide variety of dimensions, architectural layout, chronology, functions, and distinct cultural affiliations was widespread across lowland South America from the Paraná River Delta to the Llanos de Venezuela extending up to the Andean piedmont (Bonomo Politis & Gianotti, 2011; Erickson & Balée 2006; Heckenberger et al 2008; Iriarte et al 2004; Iriarte et al 2013; Prümers & Jaimes Betancourt 2014; Redmond & Spencer 2007; Schaan 2012; Walker 2018)
The new data presented here contribute to the understanding of the architectural grammar and settlement patterns of the Mound Villages (~AD 1300–1700) and the geometric ditched enclosures (~400 BC–AD 1000) revealing a much richer and complex archaeology than previously known
Our study confirms that Lidar is a technology that provides a new opportunity to locate and document earthen sites in forested parts of Amazonia characterized by dense vegetation
Summary
Earthen architecture featuring a wide variety of dimensions, architectural layout, chronology, functions, and distinct cultural affiliations was widespread across lowland South America from the Paraná River Delta to the Llanos de Venezuela extending up to the Andean piedmont (Bonomo Politis & Gianotti, 2011; Erickson & Balée 2006; Heckenberger et al 2008; Iriarte et al 2004; Iriarte et al 2013; Prümers & Jaimes Betancourt 2014; Redmond & Spencer 2007; Schaan 2012; Walker 2018). Archaeological research during the last two decades along the southern rim of the Amazon has begun to document a diversity of pre-Columbian earth-building traditions between the Upper Xingu and the Upper Purus rivers (Figure 1). It is apparent that this region of Amazonia was inhabited by numerous earth-building societies involving landscape engineering, landscape domestication and likely low-density urbanism (Heckenberger et al 2008; Levis et al 2017; Pärssinen, Schaan & Ranzi 2009; Saunaluoma & Schaan 2012; Schaan 2012; Souza et al 2018). Based on the extant data of earth-building cultures along the entire rim of the southern Amazon at the eve of European Encounter (AD 1250–1500), we predicted conservative figures of ~500 thousand to 1 million people living in this region of southern Amazonia (Souza et al 2018). The south-eastern sector of Acre state in Brazil,
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