The National Geographic reports this week on an anthropologist who uncovered dozens of organized, densely-packed towns, villages and hamlets dating to the 13th -16th centuries hidden in the Brazilian Amazon.

Capping off an intense 15 years of mapping, Michael Heckenberger and his international colleagues -- including a member of the Kuikuro, an indigenous Amazonian tribe -- report their findings in the journal Science this week. They found that vast swaths of apparently "pristine" rain forest had been cleared for elaborate settlements with evidence of a sophisticated manmade landscape across an 8,000-square-mile area prior to the arrival of European colonists.

The repeated patterns within and among settlements across the landscape suggest a more highly ordered society than contemporary medieval towns in Europe. The planned structure of these settlements is indicative of regional planning and political organization only found in urban society.

Heckenberger noted that rural landscapes in medieval European settlements were randomly oriented, but that in the Amazon things have been oriented at the same angles and distances across the entire landscape.

Larger towns, placed at cardinal points from the central seat of power, were walled much like a medieval town. Between the settlements, which today are almost completely overgrown, was a patchwork of agricultural fields for crops such as manioc along with dams and ponds likely used for fish farms. The whole landscape is almost like gridded latticework. Each of these towns had its own central plaza and was protected by an earthen wall. They were surrounded by smaller, non-walled residential hamlets. The towns, villages and hamlets were interlinked by roads, the largest of which followed the direction of the sun at the mid-year solstice.

These indigenous peoples from the Amazon had little stone close at hand. They built with earth and, after they were wiped out, the forest reclaimed the land, leaving little trace.  

The discovery forces a rethink of the long-held assumption that these parts of the Amazon were virtually untouched before colonization. Research published in January similarly found that what has long been thought of as the "original" New England landscape was in fact created by British settlers in the 17th century.

Via National Geographic
Contemporaneous portrayal of European village life by Pieter Brueghel The Elder