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Incredible Discovery Beneath the Southern Amazon Reveals Urban-Agrarian Society Never Seen Before
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Incredible Discovery Beneath the Southern Amazon Reveals Urban-Agrarian Society Never Seen Before

Scientists discovered an ancient Amazon society that thrived for 900 years, with monumental earthworks, canals, and large pyramids now hidden.

Culture & Entertainment

If one searches “Casarabe Culture” in a search engine, they won’t find much. Maybe they will see a Wikipedia article for the town of Casarabe in Bolivia less than 10 words long.

However a paper published this week in Nature reveals that down in an alluvial plane in Bolivia’s Llanos de Mojos savannah in southwest Amazonia, flourished an agrarian low-density urban society for 900 years, building hundreds of acres of monumental earthworks, canals, walls and fortifications, and large pyramids.

The Casarabe culture transformed and lived off the land in way few archeologists and historians believed possible for the Amazon.

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The sparsely populated region in the north of Bolivia has suffered little disturbance over the years, and since 1960 archeology has known that extensive evidence of earthworks was to be found in the plane—everything from causeways and mounds to potential artificial islands.

However after working in the area for 20 years, archeologist Dr. Heiko Prümers led a LIDAR survey to get an idea of the total extent of the civilized area, and has revealed details of a major continental civilization that grew maize and yuca equal to and exceeding at times the size and efficiency of similar areas in Medieval Europe.

“We have got something in the Amazon region that nobody expected, but that we know existed,” says Prümers.

“Now it’s obvious that this region of the world like many other tropical regions, like Mexico, or Angkor in Cambodia or some cities in Sri Lanka that are located in tropical regions, they are not the “green deserts” that have been imaged for a long time”.

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https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/hidden-casarabe-society-lost-in-amazon-discovered-in-bolivia/