America Before

by Graham Hancock

  Hawkins, however, was an astronomer, while Bonaldo, a real expert on South American spiders, disagrees, remarking in emails we exchanged in October 2018:

  The idea that the Nazca spider is a Ricinulei is kind of odd to me, since I always thought it was a myrmecomorphic spider such as the species of Myrmecium … Myrmecium is an exclusive South American genus, being recorded from the Venezuelan Caribbean to southern Brazil, but the majority of the species (28 out of 38) are endemic to the Amazon Basin, including lower parts of the oriental Andean slopes in Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.

  LEFT: Nazca “spider.” PHOTO: SANTHA FAIIA. RIGHT: Greatly magnified, Myrmecium from the Amazon. PHOTO: ARTHUR ANKER.

  I asked if I could quote him on this and he replied:

  Sure, you can quote it, if you want. I would add that that third leg “modification” shows no structures and is not bilateral. It appears to be just an extension of the drawing, as is common in other Nazca drawings.

  Bonaldo then kindly referred me to Arthur Anker, a colleague of his who specializes in macrophotography, and Anker in turn provided me with the image of Myrmecium from the Amazon (specifically from the Tambopata Reserve, near Puerto Maldonado) that is reproduced here. It is, in my view, a far better candidate for the Nazca spider than Ricinulei—and once again what it suggests to me is that scientists, who observed nature closely, were at work in ancient South America. But let’s lower our sights and simply say that the monkey and “spider” figures, with their Amazonian provenance, call, at the very least, for a rethink of Schaan’s view that the Nazca Lines and the Amazon geoglyphs are unconnected phenomena.

  SOME FACTS AND FIGURES ON THE AMAZONIAN GEOGLYPHS

  WHAT IS THE GENERAL STRUCTURE and appearance of the geoglyphs uncovered in the southwestern Amazon in recent decades? In their 2009 paper in Antiquity, Schaan, Ranzi, and Pärssinen give us this broad overview:

  In general, the geometric figures are formed by a ditch approximately 11m wide, currently 1–3m deep, with adjacent 0.5–1m high earthen banks, formed by deposition of the excavated soil. Ring ditches have diameters that vary from 90 to 300m. … When there are two or more structures, they are usually connected by embanked roads. Some of the single rectangular structures may have short roads coming out of their mid-sides or corners. Composite figures include a rectangle inside a circle or vice versa.27

  Some of the figures are quite roughly executed, others are extremely exact, and in some cases an exact figure is combined with an inexact one in the same geoglyph, as at Santa Isabel, for example, where a large well-made octagon is juxtaposed with an imprecise circle.

  By contrast, the geometrically austere Fazenda Parana site is “comprised of two perfect squares (200m and 100m wide) connected … by a 20m wide, 100m long causeway. The two squares are further connected to straight roads leading east and west, north and south.”28

  Fazenda Parana. MAP AND PHOTO: MARTTI PÄRSSINEN.

  Fazenda Colorada. MAP AND PHOTO: MARTTI PÄRSSINEN.

  More complex by far is the Fazenda Colorada site. Its geoglyphs consist of:

  one circle, a quadrangle and a double ditch structure which forms a three-sided square. The three-sided square double ditch is connected to a trapezoidal structure comprised by linear walls without ditches. Its south-western corner is open and connects to a c. 55m broad, avenue-like, road; on both sides of the entrance one can still see two high mounds, standing like towers. The road has embankments which border both sides, and, as it extends away from the entrance, it narrows, vanishing 600m further.29

  Then consider the site known as Fazenda Atlantica. Here the principal geoglyph forms a square measuring 250 meters along each side. Quadrants are inscribed into the east and west corners and a circle 125 meters in diameter, connected to the square by a causeway 10 meters wide, lies 150 meters to the northwest.30

  Fazenda Atlantica. MAP AND PHOTO: SANNA SAUNALUOMA.

  Defined by the avenue connecting the square and the circle, it is clear that the primary axis of Fazenda Atlantica runs northwest to southeast—an orientation that makes it a candidate for alignment to the setting sun on the June solstice and the rising sun on the December solstice. The reader will recall that Serpent Mound in Ohio is also aligned northwest to southeast to both these events. Its principal focus, signaled by its open jaws, is on the June solstice–midsummer in the Northern Hemisphere, where the Serpent is located, and midwinter in the Southern Hemisphere, where the Amazonian geoglyphs are located. Without an archaeoastronomical survey, however, it is impossible to say whether or not the general northwest to southeast alignment of Fazenda Atlantica is solstitial, and—if it is—whether any aspect of the site indicates priority given to one solstice over the other.

  A similar northwest to southeast orientation is seen at Tequinho, another of the great Amazonian geoglyphs. When all its ancillary works were intact it extended over an area of 15 hectares (37 acres). What remains today are its two principal squares, the larger measuring 210-by-210 meters (with two further squares inscribed within it) and the smaller, which has suffered extensive damage, measuring 130-by-130 meters and enclosing one further square. Defining the ruling northwest axis of the site, the main entrance to the larger square is 40 meters wide and opens onto a causeway 1.5 kilometers long.31A proper survey will be required to establish whether or not there is any archaeoastronomical significance to the northwest orientation of Tequinho’s main entrance and causeway.

  Tequinho. MAP: SANNA SAUNALUOMA. PHOTO: MARTTI PÄRSSINEN.

  Fazenda Iquiri II—The mounds form an oval with its long axis oriented to the northwest. MAP AND PHOTO: SANNA SAUNALUOMA. ORIENTATION ARROWS ADDED.

  Coquerial: The surviving ten mounds form the remains of an oval with its long axis oriented to the northwest. MAP AND PHOTO: SANNA SAUNALUOMA. ORIENTATION ARROWS ADDED.

  What is already certain, however, is that a number of other Amazonian geoglyphs share the same general alignment. An example is Fazenda Iquiri II, which combines a square earthwork measuring 140 meters along each side with an oval earthwork formed by 25 adjoining mounds. The long axis of this oval, paralleling the axis of the square, extends for 180 meters and is oriented to the northwest,32 making this site, too, a candidate for possible solstitial alignment if and when an archaeoastronomical survey is carried out.

  Another candidate is the partially destroyed site of Coqueiral, which also consists of a series of adjoining mounds, of which ten survive out of an original total of eighteen. The remaining mounds form a partial oval with its long axis extending to approximately 100 meters oriented to the northwest.33 As with Tequinho, as with Fazenda Iquiri II, and as with Fazenda Atlantica, a proper survey will be required before any possible archaeoastronomical significance of the Coqueiral oval can be investigated.

  Indeed, as I review the otherwise excellent science so far dedicated to the Amazonian earthworks, it is evident that the most serious and consequential lapse—which must be remedied if further progress is to be made—concerns this consistent blindness to possible archaeoastronomical connections. Not a single one of the many papers on the geoglyphs reviewed in this chapter has a word to say about astronomical alignments and, so far as I am aware at the time of writing, not one of the leading scholars has shown any interest in investigating the possibility that such alignments might exist. Ironically, however, the same scholars all agree:

  The geometric earthworks were constructed on carefully selected, elevated yet level surfaces. Their location on intefluvial plateaux provided good visible control over the surrounding terrain. … The carefully planned position of the earthworks in the landscape and the recurring geometric forms represented in earthwork architecture suggest functions that were part of a tradition of shared collective ideology related to the cosmology and/or socio-political concerns of the ancient peoples.

  The irony is that there’s an important clue here, hidden in plain sight. It’s true that the choice of “elevated locations” giving “good visible control over the surrounding terr
ain” could have something to do with “the socio-political concerns of the ancient peoples.” But because they offer an unobstructed view of the horizon, such locations are also very often what ancient astronomers looked for when they set out monuments on the ground—aligned, say, to the June solstice sunset or to the March equinox sunrise.

  Perhaps it’s partly in recognition of this that the passage cited above includes a token reference to “cosmology.”

  But token references are not enough.

  Without a full-scale archaeoastronomical survey of the Amazonian geoglyphs we are, in my opinion, unlikely ever to get to grips with the full range of challenges—and opportunities—that they represent.

  AN EVER-RECEDING HORIZON

  HOW OLD ARE THE GEOGLYPHS?

  In 2009 only a single carbon date had been established for the entire area surveyed, then “250 km across” and constituting “200 known sites with over 210 geometric structures.”34 The date was from Fazenda Colorada and proved to be quite recent—around 750 years before the present but with a margin of error that the investigators chose to average at AD 1283,35 a date they believed to be “representative of a number of sites” since Fazenda Colorada “exhibits much of the variability seen for the region.”36 This date, they declare, “implies a late occupation … only around 300 years before the Europeans’ arrival, but is consistent with the development of complex societies in other areas of the Amazon between A.D. 900 and 1400.”37

  As we’ve seen so often with archaeology, new discoveries can change everything, and after just three more seasons of excavation, Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen were singing a very different song. In a follow-up paper to their 2009 study, published in the Journal of Field Archaeology in 2012, they reported a greatly expanded survey area, now encompassing roughly 25,000 square kilometers.38 Within it, 281 enclosures “formed by continuous ditches, in most cases surrounding a perfectly geometric inner plaza with an area of 1 to 3 ha” had been found “in various shapes,” chiefly “circles, ellipses, rectangles and squares.”39

  Then came the first dynamite revelation. Fazenda Colorada had been thoroughly re-excavated and five additional radiocarbon samples, collected from different stratigraphic levels, were analyzed. Again, there are margins of error with C-14 dating, but the bottom line is that the previous date of AD 1283, while fitting with preconceptions about when and where complex societies developed in the Amazon, was found to have been taken from organic materials deposited very late in the life of the site. What the new samples indicated was that Fazenda Colorada had been “consistently occupied” from as early as AD 25 until around the end of the fourteenth century.40

  Organic materials from a number of other geoglyph sites were also excavated and dated, showing a similar profile, and the overall conclusion of the investigators across all the sites was that these “new radiocarbon dates place the initial stage of earthwork construction as early as 2000 BP.”41

  In summary, therefore, just 3 years of research between 2009 and 2012 witnessed a profound change in archaeological understanding of the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. Previously they’d been thought to be just 750 years old; now, without any real attention being drawn to the implications, they’d become 2,000 years old. To put this in context, an error and subsequent correction on a similar scale would certainly attract a great deal of attention if it concerned Western architecture—indeed it would be like discovering that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe such as Chartres and York Minster were not, in fact, works of the late medieval period but had actually been built by the Romans.

  What are we to conclude concerning mistakes of such magnitude, and the tendency of archaeologists to reach and propagate premature conclusions based on limited samples? For instance, the single AD 1283 date from Fazenda Colorada being allowed to stand for 3 years without corroboration as “representative of a number of sites”? And similarly at Serpent Mound in Ohio, where in 2018 a date of around AD 1000 was still being touted in official notices despite firm C-14 evidence, on the public record since 2014, that the structure is more than 1,000 years older than that?42 Readers will make up their own minds, but the uncertainty and the constant failure of old models (such as Clovis First in North America and Meggers’s “counterfeit paradise” dogma about the Amazon) do not fill me with confidence about much else that this discipline has to say.

  In particular, I am not persuaded by the new consensus that the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon are 2,000 years old. Other C-14 dates mentioned in the 2012 report already hint at a more complicated picture.

  Take the site known as Severino Calazans, for example. Curiously, the square geoglyph the archaeologists excavated here has the same massive “footprint”—measuring 230 meters along each side43—as the Great Pyramid of Egypt.44 Both monuments are also cardinally oriented—that is, their sides face the cardinal directions, north, south, east, and west.45

  Two C-14 dates for Severino Calazans were cited by Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen as further confirmation that the Amazonian geoglyph project began “about 2000 years ago.”46 Margins of error apply, but these dates were 159 BC (from excavation Unit 3) and 171 BC (from Unit 6B).47 Fitting much less comfortably into the new hypothesis, however, were the two other dates from Severino Calazans. Again, there are margins of error, but these dates were, respectively, 1211 BC (from Unit 5) and 2577 BC (from Unit 3)48—the latter suggesting that this geoglyph might not only have the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Egypt but might also be about the same age.

  We’ve seen how the existence of true civilizations in the Amazon before European contact has been cautiously embraced by archaeologists in recent years. Even so, few would yet be willing to accept that any Amazonian “civilization” worthy of the name might have existed as early as 2577 BC and certainly not one well-organized and motivated enough to create a cardinally oriented geoglyph on the grand scale of Severino Calazans, where the full perimeter, defined by an enclosure ditch 12 meters wide, measures 920 meters—more than 3,000 feet.49

  Unsurprisingly, therefore, Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen conclude that the date of 2577 BC “is probably unrelated to the time of initial construction of the earthworks.”50

  All they’re prepared to concede is that “this date suggests early human activity at the site.”51 They perhaps stick their necks out further than most of their peers would when they allow the possibility that the second anomalous date from Severino Calazans—1211 BC—“may be related to earthwork construction.”52

  But what is the logic of this? If we have dispensed with our former assertion that a date of AD 1283 was “somehow representative” of the geoglyphs in general, and if we are going to allow a possible start on this great regional project as early as 1211 BC, then why should we be unable to contemplate an even earlier start as far back as 2577 BC? Since so little of the Amazon has been surveyed by archaeologists, and since no theory about the character and constraints of its past cultures and civilizations has been able to explain all the data, it would surely be wiser to keep an open mind.

  Besides, as Ranzi, Pärssinen, and Schaan themselves point out, they are working with a very limited sample of the potential data. Pärssinen at one point estimated that as many as 1,500 geoglyphs might ultimately be found,53 and the authorities are in general agreement that “these earthworks, uncovered by modern deforestation … represent only a fraction of the total, which lie undiscovered beneath the intact seasonal southern Amazonian rainforests.”54

  It is therefore perfectly possible that multiple other sites, as yet unknown to archaeologists, will be discovered in the years to come. They might confirm the existing archaeological model that the geoglyphs are about 2,000 years old, or they might turn out to reinforce that anomalous date of 2577 BC—or, who knows, they might even provide much older dates and reveal more sophisticated constructions.

  Once again, whatever the facts are on the ground, we won’t know for sure unless we look.

  CURIOSITIES

  I
T’S A CURIOSITY—I CLAIM nothing more at this point—that the square enclosure ditch at Severino Calazans shares the ground plan, base dimensions, and cardinality of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as well as a carbon date from the epoch of the Great Pyramid.55 That epoch, moreover, around 2500 BC, coincides and overlaps with the megalithic epoch in Europe, so another curiosity is the way that the circular geoglyphs of Amazonia resemble “henges”—the circular embankments with deep internal ditches that surround the great stone circles of the British Isles. The scale is very similar and the resemblance is so obvious that even the most sober archaeologists, usually wary of cross-cultural comparisons, are willing to remark upon it. For example, Dr. Jennifer Watling of the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography at the University of São Paulo, author of an important study of the Amazonian earthworks published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in February 2017, states frankly that the characteristics of the circular geoglyphs with their embankments and ditches “are what classically describe henge sites. The earliest phases at Stonehenge consisted of a similarly laid out enclosure. … It is likely that the geoglyphs were used for similar functions to the Neolithic causewayed enclosures, i.e. public gathering, ritual sites.”56