Tropical Stonehenge found in the rainforest?
Why is everybody so surprised over the "finding" that the early inhabitants in the rainforest were "sophisticated" people? It might be a huge discovery to find a kind of Stonehenge in the rainforest, but nevertheless....This story has been published in many newspapers around the world:
A grouping of granite blocks along a grassy Amazon hilltop may be the vestiges of a centuries-old astronomical observatory.(...)
Anthropologists have long known that local indigenous populations were acute observers of the stars and sun. But the discovery of a physical structure that appears to incorporate this knowledge suggests pre-Columbian Indians in the Amazon rainforest may have been more sophisticated than previously suspected.
Archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral says:
Transforming this kind of knowledge into a monument; the transformation of something ephemeral into something concrete, could indicate the existence of a larger population and of a more complex social organization.
Scientists not involved in the discovery said it could prove valuable to understanding pre-Columbian societies in the Amazon. Michael Heckenberger of the University of Florida's Department of Anthropology, says:
Given that astronomical objects, stars, constellations etc., have a major importance in much of Amazonian mythology and cosmology, it does not in any way surprise me that such an observatory exists. (...) The traditional image is that some time thousands of years ago small groups of tropical forest horticulturists arrived in the area and they never changed _ (that) what we see today is just like it was 3,000 years ago.This is one more thing that suggests that through the past thousands of years, societies have changed quite a lot.
>> read the whole story in the Boston Globe
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