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April 08, 2012

City of Z

Thanks to Google Earth, and forestry, archeologists in Brazil are finding geoglyphs carved into the ground in the Amazon rainforest.

The geoglyphs are believed to have been sculpted by ancient people from the Amazon region around 700 years ago, though their purpose is still unknown. So far, nearly 300 geoglyphs have been identified, but with advances in satellite imaging--and increased clearing of the jungle coverage--scientists are hoping to discover many more of these strange, geometric designs.

People had long suspected a vanished civilization is hidden in the trackless wastes of the rainforest, whether known as the legendary El Dorado or (better) the lost City of Z.

Sculpted from the clay rich soils of Amazonia as perfect circles and squares, these structured earth mounds, or "geoglyphs," are located on the east side of the Andes and span a distance of 155 miles.

Built long before Christopher Columbus set foot in the new world -- the sites date from 200 to 1283 A.D.-- the earthworks are the remains of roads, bridges and squares that formed the basis for a lost civilization, according to a study published in the journal Antiquity.

Tempting as it is to ascribe civilizational collapse in the New World to the arrival of Europeans with their "guns, germs, and steel" these dates neatly match an earlier calamity, the end of the Medieval Warm Period, which put paid to classical Mayan civilization, the Chaco culture/interaction sphere, and hundreds of years of Viking settlement in Greenland. Given there has been no statistically significant global warming trend since 1995, our little Ice Age seems set to continue.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at April 8, 2012 08:47 AM