[t]he intersection of the setting sun to a rocky perch in the near distance above and to the right of the painted outcrop.
The annual movement of the sun relative to the rocky perch allows for the intersection of the setting sun through the center of the perch approximately 18–20 days before and after the winter solstice (which currently occurs on December 21). … If each box of the painted grid image represents one day of observing the setting of the sun relative to the rocky perch, 49 days after the day of the winter solstice, the sun sets too far to the north of the rocky perch, entirely missing the structure. The grid painting has 49 total boxes and the center boxes have tally marks that are simply vertical lines. Most other tally marks are crisscrosses. The rocky perch and the grid image might, therefore, have been a way for paleoindians to foretell the winter solstice and the passage of a new year.28
Painel do Pilão painted outcrop with its rock art surface in the center-to-left foreground, and a rocky outcrop with a window-like feature at a distance in the top right background of the photo. The sun intersects this “window” in the early afternoon 18 to 20 days before and after the winter solstice. PHOTO: CHRISTOPHER SEAN DAVIS. ANNOTATION ADDED.
What adds to the likelihood that Davis is correct is that he and his team found other alignments at Painel do Pilão. For example, just as the orientation of what they call the “platform stage” suggests an ancient focus on the December solstice sunset, so, too, another prominent cluster of images aligns to the rising point of the sun on the June solstice.29
Meanwhile:
A third astronomy alignment occurs with a single red pictograph discovered above the excavation unit on a vertical ledge on the underside of the painted outcrop. The ledge may have been intentionally altered, but further investigation is needed for certainty. The painted circle itself faces 270° [the azimuth of sunset on the equinox], but the shelter walls block all views of the western horizon or sky from this location. However, just beneath the circle and ledge is an opening that allows one to see through to the other side of the outcrop and the horizon beyond. This vantage point beneath the painted circle aligns to ~90°, the position of the rising sun on the equinox, which occurs on March 20 and September 23 currently.30
At the very least, says Davis, the rock art and alignments at Painel do Pilão tell us that cultures in the heart of the Amazon 13,000 years ago “engaged and utilized sophisticated knowledge of astronomy maintained through rock art and possibly shared or reimagined by more recent cultures who either inherited or rediscovered the ancient paintings.”31
He’s right to draw attention to the legacy aspect of all this—the possibility, long after the original painters and horizon astronomers of Painel do Pilão were gone, that later cultures might have inherited and reimagined the ancient ideas and obsessions manifested there. This is how we would expect carefully crafted and cleverly designed memes to propagate themselves down the ages, and it appears to echo exactly the process at Serpent Mound, which was likewise maintained, renovated, and reimagined by successive cultures down the ages and which likewise signals the solstices and the equinoxes.
Painel do Pilão is important because it tells us that the “meme” of sacred structures aligned to the solstices and equinoxes, found in monumental art and architecture all around the world, has been present in the Amazon for at least 13,000-years and perhaps—we must await future discoveries in the unexplored reaches of the jungle—for far longer than that.
It also has wider implications. If people were capable of carefully marking, recording, and honoring these celestial events in South America 13,000 years ago, then there is no good reason to suppose they should not have done so in North America as well—and therefore no good reason to dismiss the possibility that Serpent Mound’s original alignments also go back to that distant epoch.
Archaeology says a firm NO to this, accompanied by guffaws of derision.
As we’ve seen, however, the archaeology of Serpent Mound is riddled with contradictions and uncertainties and appears to have produced dates marking various episodes of restoration and renovation rather than convincing evidence of when the monument was originally designed and founded.
HYPOTHESIS
IN HIS REPORT CHRISTOPHER DAVIS mentions Rego Grande, “presumed to be more recent” than Painel do Pilão, as another Amazonian site at which archaeoastronomical alignments have been investigated.32 He draws no specific connection beyond that, but in my view the confirmation of a solstitial focus at both, as also at Serpent Mound in Ohio, and Stonehenge and other megalithic sites worldwide, is noteworthy.
Moreover, although there is no henge at Rego Grande, we’ve seen that the solstitially aligned stone circle there shares the Amazon basin with huge numbers of hengelike earthworks. We’ve noted how these, too, have never been subject to any kind of rigorous archaeoastronomical investigation. Meanwhile, the total number of geometric ditched enclosures discovered in the southwestern Amazon survey area had increased from “over 210,” the figure on record in 2009, to “over 450” by 2017.33
Then in 2018 a further study by Denise Schaan and colleagues reported an extension of the survey area across much of the southern rim of the Amazon basin:
The results show that an 1800 km stretch of southern Amazonia was occupied by earth-building cultures.34
In one area alone, the Upper Tapajos Basin, 81 previously unknown pre-Columbian sites were discovered, with a total of 104 earthworks.35 Among them were many complex enclosures including one, 390 meters in diameter, featuring 11 mounds circularly arranged at the center of the enclosure.36
The researchers suggest that at least 1,300 further sites remain hidden within the jungles of the Amazon’s southern rim—a number, they add, that is “likely to be an underestimation”37 while “huge swaths of the rainforest are still unexplored.”38 They remind us that the terre firme forests “that account for ~95% of the Amazon are particularly uncharted” because “these areas have been archaeologically neglected following traditional views that pre-Columbian people concentrated on resource-rich floodplains. However, the discovery of large pre-Columbian earthworks in terra firme along the Southern Rim of the Amazon undermines the assumption that these areas were marginal in terms of past human impact and the development of complex societies.”39
It is undoubtedly the case that many more structures remain to be found than have already presented themselves to science. Our entire understanding of this vast region is being transformed by new discoveries and, indeed, as we’ve seen, the notion of complex societies in the pre-Columbian Amazon is no longer anathema to archaeologists, some of whom now even dare to describe those societies as “civilizations.”
Given that such civilizations existed in ancient Amazonia, and clearly had the capacity to manifest their ideas in great public projects, it is intriguing that the end result was the vigorous, flamboyant, and extensive expression of the very same architectural, astronomical, and geometrical “memes” that characterize sacred architecture in many other parts of the world, and at many different periods.
An analogy between genetics and culture—genes and memes—can serve us well here.
Let’s say, purely hypothetically of course, that a system of ideas is transferred, by direct teachings, from one culture to another. The recipient society as a whole, however, may not yet be ready to put the teachings into practice. What is required, then, is that some sort of institution be set up that can recruit the brightest and the best from the local population. They, in turn, will draft new talent with each new generation, initiating them and training them in the essential details of the system—which will assume the character of a religion and will in due course integrate itself deeply into every level, even into the habits of thought, of the recipient culture. Eventually, when the right time for the next stage of the project is judged to have arrived—perhaps very soon, perhaps after thousands of years, depending on local circumstances—the religious leaders will mobilize the population to enact the great project
s of sacred geometry that had for so long remained encoded, but unexpressed, within their cultural DNA.40
It is, I emphasize, only a hypothesis. In this context, though, it’s thought-provoking to consider an ethnographic report from 1887 written by a certain Colonel Antonio R. P. Labre after he had ascended the Madeira, the Beni, and the Madre de Dios Rivers and then crossed overland to the Acre River. His journey took him right through the heart of the geoglyph territory of Acre and involved numerous encounters with its inhabitants, the Araona people—who had, by that time, been reduced to a tiny remnant after hundreds of years of devastating epidemics, slave raids, and murderous attacks by commercial rubber tappers seeking to drive them off their land. “It was not uncommon,” writes Denise Schaan, “for rubber tappers to capture native women for wives. The encroaching whites would frequently promote raids to enslave the native population for the rubber industry, a situation that 40 years later would result in the near-extinction of tens of thousands of natives.”41
Since all work on the geoglyphs had ceased hundreds of years previously, we can only guess how much of the past of their once great culture these harried, encroached-upon, and deeply endangered Aroanas remembered by the time of Labre’s visit. We cannot even be sure that they were the direct descendants of the geoglyph builders (rather than of more recent migrants to the area).
Nonetheless, what Labre tells us feels significant. He didn’t see the geoglyphs, which were then entirely overgrown by jungle, but he was in the midst of them on August 17, 1887, when he stayed overnight at an Aroana village called Mamuceyada. He describes there being, as well as plantations, “about 200 inhabitants … a form of government, temples and a form of worship”—from which, together with “knowing the name of the idols,” women were excluded. Of particular importance and relevance here is Labre’s report:
The idols are not of human form, but are geometrical figures made of wood and polished. The father of the gods is called Epymara, his image has an elliptical form, and is about 16 inches high. … Although they have “medicine-men” charged with religious duties and remaining celibates, the chief is nevertheless pontifex of the church.42
Consider the improbability of this if it does not arise from some real though forgotten connection. Here in a landscape mysteriously inscribed in antiquity with vast geometrical earthworks, at a time when the earthworks themselves had long since been swallowed by jungle, we find a Native American tribe whose gods take the form of polished wooden “geometrical figures.” The tribal chief is the religious leader but there are also “medicine-men” who likewise have religious duties.
It already sounds exactly like the sort of institution for the replication and transmission of geometric memes that I proposed as a hypothesis earlier, but it gets even more interesting when the shamans involved, and often the population, are drinking ayahuasca.
THE VINE OF THE DEAD
WHAT ARE THE AMAZONIAN GEOGLYPHS? Why did the ancients go to such trouble to make these colossal earthworks? Why is geometry their most obvious theme? And to what extent, if any, since stone circles are frequently associated with similar earthworks elsewhere, does the presence of stone circles in the Amazon help us to understand the geoglyphs?
So far we have considered only geometry and certain cosmic alignments, but my hypothesis in both cases, and in the case of the extraordinarily similar earthworks of the Mississippi Valley that we’ll explore in parts 5 and 6, is that we are dealing with “memes” here. Moreover, it is a phenomenon in itself that the same memes appear again and again among seemingly unrelated cultures of both the Old World and the New World, separated sometimes not only by thousands of miles but by thousands of years.
Much more work will be required to establish when the memes of geometry and cosmic alignment first took root in the Amazon. Archaeology on its own is of limited use to us here, since so little has been done even at the sites already discovered and since so much of the region has never been investigated at all. What would help would be a much more thorough and detailed archaeoastronomical survey of Rego Grande, and of other stone circles in its vicinity, than has already been undertaken. In parallel, as I argued earlier, an equally thorough archaeoastronomical survey of the Amazonian geoglyphs is a must if we are to refine not only our understanding of their geometry but also to tease out any cosmic alignments they may contain. Since no such study has yet been undertaken all we can say for sure is that some of the geoglyphs reviewed in chapter 15 are, definitely, cosmically aligned.
We’ve seen, for example, that both Fazenda Parana and Severino Calazans consist of square geoglyphs. The first features two squares, one 200 meters along each side and the second exactly half that size, with an interconnecting causeway. Meanwhile, the second site has side lengths of 230 meters, giving it the same footprint as the Great Pyramid of Egypt. All four of these squares—the two at Fazenda Parana, the one at Severino Calazans, and of course the Great Pyramid itself, are cardinally oriented, that is, their sides face true north, south, east, and west. The most basic and obvious of the cosmic alignments shared across these sites are therefore to the celestial north and south poles (the points on the celestial sphere directly above the earth’s geographic north and south poles, around which the stars and planets appear to rotate during the course of the night1), and to the points of sunrise and sunset on the spring and autumn equinoxes (when the sun rises perfectly due east and sets perfectly due west).
We’ve also seen that other great earthworks of the Amazon feature strong northwest-to-southeast orientations. This would put the investigation of possible solstitial alignments and also of “lunar standstill alignments” (of which more in part 5) at the top of the list of priorities if any proper archao-astronomical survey should ever be undertaken.
I think it likely that such a survey of the Amazonian geoglyphs, as of the stone circles, would reveal many more (and far more intricate) cosmic alignments, perhaps even as subtle and complex as the multiple alignments found at the Great Pyramid, Stonehenge, and Serpent Mound. There’s little point in speculating further on such matters when we don’t yet have the necessary data from the Amazon. For the sake of argument, however, let’s assume that the memes of geometry and cosmic alignment are part of a connected system there, as they are in so many other parts of the world where the required research has already been done. In that case we can say, on the basis of the equinoctial and solstitial alignments at Painel do Pilão, the single Amazonian site where something approaching a thorough archaeoastronomical study has been undertaken, that the system must have reached Amazonia at least 13,000 years ago. That it should then have later iterations in different media, such as the stone circle at Rego Grande and the great cosmically aligned geoglyphs at Severino Calazans and Fazenda Parana, should not surprise us.
We are dealing, I believe, with deliberately created memes here—memes that have a deeply mysterious purpose and that function in ineffable ways. They are transmitted by repetition and replication, which explains their similarities. But cultures, once separated, tend to evolve and develop in their own distinctive and quirky fashion. We can therefore expect that not only the media and materials through which the memes are made manifest, but also their local interpretation, will vary greatly through time and between one part of the world and another while nonetheless retaining a constant core of unvarying central ideas.
WESTERN SCIENCE WADES IN
THE FIRST EFFORTS OF WESTERN scientists to interpret the geoglyphs of Amazonia were predictably utilitarian and reductionist, with attempts being made to persuade us that the great geometrical earthworks must have been built for defensive purposes. But with no evidence of warfare around them, with the ditches clearly not “moats” (since so many of them are placed within the earthen embankments rather than outside them), and with no evidence of palisade walls (for example, in the form of postholes or wooden remains), this theory soon lost favor.2 Not only was there no evidence of warfare, but actually very little at all in the way of archaeologic
al materials—pottery, figurines, refuse, et cetera—that would help to decipher the use, meaning, and purpose of the geoglyphs. The consensus now, therefore, is that they were created for “ritual,” “spiritual,” “religious,” and “ceremonial” purposes.3
William Balée, professor of anthropology at Tulane University, is a supporter of this new consensus, but is doing no more than stating the obvious when he suggests that the spiritual/religious role of the Amazonian glyphs must in some way have involved “geometry and gigantism.”4
Well, yes, professor. Obviously! But in what way? And to what purposes?
If we seek useful answers to such questions, rather than easy inferences or mere descriptions of these gigantic geometric patterns, then we are going to have to do what a very few Western scientists, to their credit, are now doing—and that is to consult indigenous peoples still living in the Amazon today.
Finnish scholars Sanna Saunaluoma and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen have led the way in this fresh approach. The cultural destruction of the past five centuries has wiped many of the tribal memory banks clean—the ongoing process of imposed amnesia that has left us so bereft of knowledge about the ancient Amazon. It is clear, however, that all is not yet lost.
In 2013, for example, Saunaluoma and Virtanen brought a group of five Manchineri—an indigenous tribe living today in the region of the earthworks—to visit Jacó Sá. This immense geoglyph, depicting a circle within a square, as the reader will recall, is located about 250 kilometers from their territory. The investigators report that the Manchineri “immediately reported feeling sensations of being in an ancient ritual atmosphere.” Moreover, “They said that their ancestors had talked about these types of places, although they could not offer any explanation as to why the earthwork ditches were so deep or even why they had been constructed.”5
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