A point of order here. A “henge” is a prehistoric earthwork formed by a circular embankment surrounding a ditch. Usually the embankment is heaped up from the soil removed to create the ditch. This is the case, for example, at the causewayed enclosure of Avebury, Europe’s largest henge, which has a diameter of approximately 420 meters.57 Walking briskly it takes about half an hour to make a complete circuit of the lip of the Avebury embankment from which you look down, across the ditch, at the immense circular inner plaza that the ditch defines. Disposed at intervals around the outer perimeter of this plaza, set back a couple of meters from its edge, a complete ring of giant megaliths once stood in antiquity, encompassing two other stone circles placed side by side. Very few of the original megaliths now remain—the site having been used as a quarry in later times—but, although Avebury’s causeways are almost entirely gone, the henge is still there and it is still possible to make out the form of the great stone circle that it encloses and the remnants of the paired inner circles. What cannot now be seen, but was discovered in 2017 by archaeologists using ground-penetrating radar, is the square formation, measuring 30 meters along each side, again defined by a perimeter of standing stones, that once occupied the center of the southernmost of the two inner circles.58
An impression by the antiquarian William Stukeley (early eighteenth century) of the complete Avebury complex as it would originally have appeared in its landscape. Approached by two monumental serpentine causeways, the great henge is top center, with its pair of inner circles clearly shown.
LEFT: Detail of the main henge at Avebury with its two inner circles. RIGHT: Reconstruction of Avebury’s southern inner circle showing a composite of multiple phases of activity spanning up to 2,000 years. Based on M. Gillings et al. “The Origins of Avebury,” in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press) [in press]. IMAGE COURTESY OF PROFESSOR MARK GILLINGS, SCHOOL OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANCIENT HISTORY, UNIVERSITY OF UEICESTER.
The Amazon: Squaring the circle at Jacó Sá. PHOTO: RICARDO AZOURY/PULSAR IMAGENS.
Strangely enough, at a site called Jacó Sá in the Amazon we also find a geoglyph in which circle and square are combined, but here it is the square that encloses the circle: “The square sides,” report Ranzi, Schaan, and their colleagues, “are 140 m long, while the external embankment is 12 m wide and 1.6 m high. The circle contains an internal embankment, and is 100 m in diameter.”59
This mention of embankments raises a more general point. Though Avebury is a true henge, Stonehenge—despite its name—technically is not. This is because its original great circular ditch was cut outside, not inside, its embankment.60 As Jennifer Watling remarks, it’s interesting to note that some of the Amazonian geoglyphs have this same format “with an outer ditch.”61 Some, like Jacó Sá, have both. As with the British henges, however, so with the Amazon. Ranzi, Schaan, and Pärssinen confirm that “the ditches” of the Amazonian geoglyphs “are usually situated inside the embankments.”62
A GLOBAL LEGACY?
JENNIFER WATLING’S PAPER, COAUTHORED WITH Denise Schaan, Alceu Ranzi, and others, describes circular geoglyphs of the Amazon “with ditches up to 11 m wide, 4 m deep, and 100–300 m in diameter.”63 The authors argue that these sites, “some of which have up to six enclosures … rival the most impressive examples of pre-Columbian monumental architecture anywhere in the Americas.” Their excavations found “an almost complete absence of cultural material … within the enclosed areas.” They conclude that the earthworks “were built and used sporadically as ceremonial and public gathering sites between 2000 and 650 calibrated years before present, but that some may have been constructed as early as 3500–3000 BP.”64
I’ve put the early dates in bold for two reasons.
First, because they are given in the paper at all. What we have here is a group of mainstream archaeologists sticking their necks out a little bit further in the pages of a prestigious journal on what, until now, would have been thought of as an impossible achievement for Amazonian societies 3,500 years ago.
Second, these same archaeologists are still being cautious. The period of 3500–3000 BP that they’re prepared to entertain for the construction of at least “some” of the geoglyphs corresponds with Unit 5 at Severino Calazans, where a sample yielded a date, within the usual margins of error, of 1211 BC.65
The paper makes no mention, however, of the other much earlier date of 2577 BC that was retrieved from Unit 366—the date that coincides with the epoch of Stonehenge, Avebury, and the Great Pyramid of Egypt.
Before I go further let me reiterate a key point about which it is important to be absolutely clear. It is NOT my purpose here to insinuate that the Amazonian geoglyphs were in any way inspired by Britain’s stone circles, or by the Great Pyramid of Egypt or by other known Old World monuments—or, for that matter, vice versa. Where there are similarities, my suggestion is that it might be more fruitful to look for their origins in a remote ancestral civilization that passed down a common inheritance all around the globe—an inheritance of knowledge, an inheritance of science, an inheritance of “earth-measuring” that was then put into practice in many different environments by the many different cultures receiving it.
In some, the inheritance may have been rejected at the outset, or subsequently frittered away and lost. In others, as millennia passed, locally originated differences in expression multiplied to such an extent that they often almost completely obscured the underlying genetic connections to a remote common ancestor.
Nonetheless, dig deep enough and those connections—like recessive genes—sooner or later make themselves felt.
Not all the henges of the British Isles contain stone circles; many are simply gigantic earthworks like the geoglyphs of the southwestern Amazon. No megalithic monuments have yet been found in the Brazilian state of Acre where the geoglyphs proliferate—perhaps because of a lack of good natural materials, or perhaps because so much of the area has yet to be properly surveyed.
There are stone circles in the Amazon, however, as we shall see in the next chapter.
THE AMAZON’S OWN STONEHENGE
THE FIRST FOREIGN VISITOR TO mention the existence of megalithic circles in the Amazon was the Swiss zoologist Emílio Goeldi, who traveled up the Cunani River into what is now the northern part of the Brazilian state of Amapá, near its border with French Guiana, in the late nineteenth century.1 He makes no mention, however, of formations of huge granite blocks, obviously worked upon and moved into place by human beings, overlooking a stream called the Rego Grande.
In the 1920s Curt Nimuendajú, a German-Brazilian ethnologist, also visited megaliths in the region, but he likewise appears to have been unaware of the spectacular formations of Rego Grande. They were seen, however, and noted by Betty Meggers and her colleague Clifford Evans of the Smithsonian Institution in the 1950s2 and now, at last, with the Smithsonian’s resources, came the opportunity for a thorough investigation of the mysterious site. Predictably, what we might call “the curse of Meggers” descended upon the Rego Grande stone circles. These great formations of megaliths shouldn’t have existed at all, according to her prejudices about the ancient Amazon, and were thus deemed unworthy of further excavation.3
Thereafter, lacking the Smithsonian’s seal of approval, the interesting problem of Rego Grande was quietly set aside and ignored by archaeology for the next 40 years while the site itself fell back into its former state of absolute obscurity and was in due course forgotten.
But climates of opinion in scholarship from time to time undergo radical shifts, and forgotten things sometimes cry out to be remembered. Thus, just as the geoglyphs of Acre were first identified back in the 1970s in an area where swaths of formerly dense rainforest were being cleared for use by the cattle industry, so it was with the Rego Grande stone circles. They were rediscovered in the 1990s by ranch foreman Lailson Camelo da Silva, who was clearing land for pasture. “I had no idea that I was discovering the Amazon’s own Stonehenge,” he later told a reporter. “It mak
es me wonder. What other secrets about our past are still hidden in Brazil’s jungles?”4
The publicity around Silva’s “discovery,” coupled with new insights into the complexity of ancient Amazonian civilization, led to a gradual reawakening of interest in Rego Grande. More research was done and out of roughly 200 prehistoric sites identified across the state of Amapá it was found that 30 had megalithic monuments of one kind or another.5
In 2005 archaeologists Mariana Petry Cabral and João Darcy de Moura Saldanha of Amapá’s Institute of Scientific and Technological Research set about the task of surveying them all, with a particular focus on Rego Grande. There, the principal stone circle, which has a diameter of 30 meters, consists of 127 upright megaliths. Brought from a quarry 3 kilometers away, the megaliths weigh up to 4 tons each and stand between 2.5 meters (just over 8 feet) and 4 meters (just over 13 feet) tall.6 Areas within the circle were used for elaborate human burials involving funerary urns and vases in a known pottery style of the region.
By 2011 a preliminary age of about 1,000 years was being suggested for the site. This was based, according to Mariana Cabral, on “three date checks on fragments of charcoal” found among pottery in the burial area.7 Ten other prehistoric sites in the state of Amapá, three of them with megaliths, were also dated in the same way and “all seem to have been occupied between seven hundred and a thousand years ago.”8
Much more work will have to be done before we can be sure that these dates will not be revised—like the ages of the geoglyphs—in the light of new evidence. Most important, meticulous care will have to be taken to be certain that the stone circle, on the one hand, and the burials from which the C-14 dates were derived, on the other, are works of the same period. The phenomenon of “intrusive burials” is one that archaeologists commonly encounter; particularly where an ancient, sacred site is involved there is a tendency for later people to want to bury and sanctify their dead there (such anachronistic burials have been found, for example, at the Sphinx and at the Third Pyramid at Giza). The danger, therefore, is that an older site will be given a falsely young date based on materials from the intrusive burial.
Indeed, Cabral and Saldanha note that pottery of the same style and type as the pieces at Rego Grande from which the samples of charcoal were taken is common along “all of the northern coast of Amapá and in French Guiana” and has also been “regularly found in prehistoric sites that have no stone monuments.”9
I’m therefore not convinced by the association of this pottery and carbon-datable charcoal with the original construction date of the stone circle at Rego Grande. That being said, however, it makes no difference to me if it does turn out to be of the same age as the burials. My argument is not that every mysterious monument now emerging from the depths of the Amazon must date back to the Pleistocene. I’m concerned here, rather, with the manifestation of a legacy of ideas that may be of Ice Age antiquity—ideas involving geometry and ideas also very much involving astronomy. It’s the ideas that matter, whether we encounter them in the Amazon, or at Serpent Mound in Ohio, or at Angkor in Cambodia, or at Stonehenge in the British Isles, or among the monuments of Egypt’s Giza plateau. If mechanisms to carry, preserve, and transmit them down the generations have been introgressed into the local cultural DNA, then I see no reason why they should not manifest, and reveal their fundamental similarities, wherever and whenever conducive circumstances arise.
It therefore has to be of interest, whatever the age of the great stone circle at Rego Grande ultimately proves to be, that it appears to share a key “meme” with Stonehenge and with Serpent Mound.
The primary alignment of Serpent Mound is to the summer solstice sunset. But in the reverse direction the same alignment targets—and in a convolution of the Serpent’s body recognizes—the winter solstice sunrise. Two other convolutions target, respectively, the equinox sunrise and the summer solstice sunrise.
Coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene,10 the word “meme” refers to “An element of a culture or system of behavior passed from one individual to another by imitation or other non-genetic means.”11
In the case of Stonehenge, Serpent Mound, and Rego Grande, the meme concerns the orientation of the sites—which in all three cases honors the sun on the June and December solstices. We reviewed these alignments for Stonehenge and Serpent Mound in part 1, and the reader will recall that they are reversible—that is, an alignment to the summer solstice sunrise is also, in the reverse direction, an alignment to the winter solstice sunset, while an alignment to the winter solstice sunrise is also, in the reverse direction, an alignment to the summer solstice sunset.
In the case of Rego Grande, it is the winter solstice that is the primary focus. Cabral and Saldanha point to a megalith that uses shadow effects to track “the sun’s path throughout this day.”12 Two other granite megaliths close by, one with an artificial hole cut through it, also line up to track the rising point of the winter solstice sun.13
The Rego Grande Stone Circle. PHOTO: MARIANA CABRAL. Stone 3 tracks the path of the sun throughout the day on the winter solstice. Stones 1 and 2 (the former with a sighting hole cut through it—see inset) line up to target the winter solstice sunrise.
The strong foundations of the site make it unlikely that the megaliths would have shifted position. Even blocks lying horizontally, it turns out, have not fallen but were purposefully placed:
Those lying on the ground never stood upright. Instead, the layer of laterite [beneath them] was carefully dug so that they fit snugly with the ground. Excavations carried out … around the bottom of the standing stones also revealed small blocks of granite and laterite which were used to wedge the monoliths at this unusual angle.14
Cabral and Saldanha’s conclusion is that all the angles were “carefully considered by those who conceived them.”15
Archaeologist Manoel Calado of the University of Lisbon, an expert on Portuguese megaliths, agrees. “I’m sure,” he said after a visit to Rego Grande. “This is one of the aspects that makes the Amazon megaliths very similar to those in Europe.”16
Richard Callahan, professor of archaeology at the University of Calgary, is also on Cabral and Saldanha’s side:
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.17
For Eduardo Neves, too, “the idea of the place being a sort of observatory is a good one,” although he adds, quite rightly, that “we still need to test it.”18
PAINEL DO PILÃO
ONLY THE MOST RUDIMENTARY SURVEY has been undertaken at Rego Grande, enough to reveal the major solstitial focus of the great stone circle, but nothing more. Other, much richer information may or may not be concealed within the multiple alignments of the megaliths, as is the case at Stonehenge and Serpent Mound, but a major archaeoastronomical study will be required to settle the matter. As Jarita Holbrook, associate professor of physics at South Africa’s University of the Western Cape, comments: “It takes more than a circle of standing stones to get a Stonehenge.”19
I would add, however, that a circle of standing stones with a solstitial alignment is a pretty good start!
Moreover, and I suggest of great relevance given the uncertainty over the dates of Rego Grande, a major archaeoastronomical study has already been undertaken at another Amazonian site approximately 550 kilometers to the southwest. Named Painel do Pilão, it is located just 400 meters from Pedra Pintada, the painted rock shelter investigated in 1996 by Anna Roosevelt. We saw in chapter 12 how she and her team excavated multiple occupation layers within the shelter, the oldest and deepest of which turned out to be perhaps as old as 16,000 years (according to thermoluminescence dating) and 14,200 years (according to radiocarbon dating).20
There has been no serious challenge to these dates but, following further work by Roosevelt, Pedra Pintada’s rock art is now usually reported, reflecting the
current cautious consensus of the archaeological community, to date between 13,630 and 11,705 years ago.21
Dates for the art at the nearby Painel do Pilão rock shelter, excavated by Christopher Sean Davis of Northern Illinois University, are closely similar, being variously given in his 2016 report at between 13,014 and 12,725 years ago, and between 13,135 and 12,810 years ago.22 All together a total of four samples from two adjacent excavation levels were subjected to C-14 testing. All were found, says Davis, “to be consistent and contemporary to Roosevelt’s paleoindian dates from Caverna da Pedra Pintada.”23 His conclusion, therefore, is that the initial artworks of Painel do Pilão were created at “around the time that the area was first inhabited 13,000 years ago, and that those earliest images, which were probably retouched or traced more recently, were positioned in the most prominent wall locations and height.”24
Davis suggests that the rock wall itself, as well as the floor at its base, were deliberately leveled by the ancients to form a 90-degree angle to one another. The whole ensemble, he says, was “made straight and flat throughout” to configure a “platform stage from which an observer can view the rock art from a specific location.”25
Once standing in that location, Davis further notes, “the painting most central to the observer’s field of view is a grid image that has individual boxes marked with mostly repetitive (but some varying) tallies.”26
Painel do Pilão “calendar.” PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER SEAN DAVIS.
It looks like a calendar—and indeed, some years before Davis, Roosevelt was the first scholar to consider that possibility.27 While recognizing that “alternative theories not related to astronomy cannot be ruled out,” Davis reinvestigated the matter over the course of a solar year and noticed a possible pattern to do with
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