Brazilian Stonehenge

A 2000 year-old site in the northern Amazon Basin in Brazil has large stone structures that seem to follow astronomical alignments. In the shorthand way that news organizations have it is now the Brazilian Stonehenge.

Amazonian archaeology is in the midst of revolution that is well described in Charles Mann's 1491. The earliest European explorers to penetrate the area found a relatively small population of swidden agriculturalists, who moved their villages every few years as the soil around them was depleted. Most were at a tribal level of social organization. Archaeologists projected this settlement model into prehistory.

Recent work has shown that Precolumbian settlement was quite different. There was a dense population that lived in large permanent villages placed atop artifical mounds to raise them above the floodplain. They were more advanced politically and socially than the historically known people. The rainforest environment was managed and manipulated by them to allow for this settlement model. The cultures seen by the explorers were the mere remnant of their ancestors after their devastation by European diseases.

This stone alignment is an achievement of those earlier people.