Archaeologica.org

Cognito wrote:RS, I don't know where you pulled your figures from (other than the standard location),

Bingo the first time!
So what your post proves is that wildly varying figures are being bandied about the Black Death's supposed effects: 25 million casualties according to your sources, 75 to 100 million according to mine. Which one is right is anybody's guess, but one thing is for sure: it was as dramatic as hell and, to the Europeans of the time, it must have seemed they were in purgatory. Nevertheless it was eclipsed by the effects of Europeans' contact with the new world Indians and the South African Hottentots. Which were a magnitude more dramatic still: 95% of the Indians perished, and 100% of the Hottentots did.

Whoever did this I think it is safe to say was not a 30 member group of hunter/gatherers!

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/09 ... rvings.php

Road workers in Brazil were preparing to pave a highway through the Amazon rainforest recently, when they made an important archeological discovery -- a series of enormous earth carvings, barely perceptible from the ground. Known as geoglyphs by researchers, these complex geometric designs are thought to have been crafted by ancient civilizations centuries earlier, though their purpose, to this day, remains a mystery.

Minimalist wrote:Whoever did this I think it is safe to say was not a 30 member group of hunter/gatherers!

Why! It's obvious that the lowland cousins of the Nazca people did it, isn't it?

Who weren't HGs, either.

Not really, RS.

I think the term “geoglyph” in the story is a bad translation.

The Nazca geoglyphs were symbolic images.

These seem to be a more practical series of raised platforms to get above the seasonal floods yet maintain agricultural and residential areas.

True, one thing that they did not have to worry about at Nazca were floods.

kbs2244 wrote:These seem to be a more practical series of raised platforms to get above the seasonal floods yet maintain agricultural and residential areas.

Exactly like the beaker culture people did in the low countries in Europe from about 7 KYA onwards: living quarters, community buildings and stables/corrals were built on man-made mounds of dirt and silt, low hills really, in the great North Sea river delta, to keep feet dry during a frequent – tidal – flooding phenomenon: spring tide. I.o.w.: monthly, at full moon. An m.o. that functioned for at least 6,000 years, until medieval times, when it was superceded by systems of dykes, a.k.a. levees, polders and windmill waterpumps.

There are still many villages and hamlets on top of those ancient man-made mounds today.

It turns out that the mounds in the Amazon basin weren't just to live on to escape seasonal floods. They were also agricultural plots. The mound effect being the result of a specially man-made soil, "terra preta" (black soil). An extremely fertile mix of the standard yellow, very poor soil, organic waste, and charcoal that was deposited on top of the poor yellow soil. And successfully tended for at least one-and-a-half millennium, feeding millions!

http://archaeologica.boardbot.com/viewt ... f=9&t=2763
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1eYn76bO4E
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Orellana
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Dorado