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Preliminary results of the 2017 season in the Amazonian earthen structures known as geoglyphs.

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The first season of fieldwork by the Universitat de València Estudi General (UVEG) and the Universidade Federal do Acre (UFAC) research joint team has made significant progress in the knowledge of earthen struc-tures built in the Amazonian landscape, popularly known as geoglyphs. Progress has been: a) remarkable in some aspects of research field, among them the first application of high-precision surveying to some of the structures, b) important with respect to understanding the general phenomenon and c) outstanding in applying a new survey strategy.
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Texto recibido el 17/11/2017
Texto aceptado el 21/11/2017
SAGVNTVM (P.L.A.V.) 49, 2017: 231 - 234
ISSN: 0210-3729
ISSN online: 2174-517X
DOI: 10.7203/SAGVNTVM.49.10998
Copyright: © 2017 Agustín Diez Castillo et al. This is an open access paper distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons License, (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0), which permits unrestricted use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
(1) Grup d’Investigació GRAM. Dpt. Prehistòria, Arqueologia i Hª Antiga. Universitat de València. adiez@uv.es
(2) Fundação de Cultura e Comunicação Elias Mansour. ivandrar@yahoo.com.br
(3) Universidade Federal do Acre. tjgfernandes@yahoo.com.br
(4) Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade. uvio.mascarenhas@icmbio.gov.br
(5) Instituto de Patrimonio Histórico e Artístico de Brasil (IPHAN). mardinisobrinho@gmail.com
(6) Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuária - EMBRAPA. evandro.gueiredo@embrapa.br
AGUSTÍN DIEZ CASTILLO1 , IVANDRA RAMPANELLI2, TARSICIO JOSE GUALBERTO FERNANDES3 ,
FLUVIO DE SOUSA MASCARENHAS4, JORGE MARDINI SOBRINHO5, EVANDRO ORFANÓ FIGUEIREDO6
PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF THE 2017 SEASON IN THE AMAZONIAN EARTHEN
STRUCTURES KNOWN AS GEOGLYPHS
The rst season of eldwork by the Universitat de
València Estudi General (UVEG) and the Universidade
Federal do Acre (UFAC) research joint team has made
signicant progress in the knowledge of earthen struc-
tures built in the Amazonian landscape, popularly known
as geoglyphs. Progress has been:
a) remarkable in some aspects of research eld, among
them the rst application of high-precision surveying
to some of the structures,
b) important with respect to understanding the general
phenomenon and
c) outstanding in applying a new survey strategy.
The addition of a new structure within the Reserva
Extrativista Chico Mendes, on the Santa Rosa land, lo-
cated by one of us (Fluvio de Sousa Mascarenhas) and
some novelties like the nding of ceramic remains on the
surface of the structures Xipamanú 2 and Piçarreira both
in the municipality of Xapurí. Finally, the visit to the
monuments of the colony of Nossa Senhora de Nazaré
has served to verify the importance of that group (g. 1).
Based upon the current knowledge of the phenome-
non (Rampanelli 2016) we can argue that the earthen
structures of trenches in the western Amazon are located
almost entirely in the triangle between the Purus rivers at
the North and the Xipamanu Abunã system at the South
before this ends into the Madeira river. The western
boundary is more vague but goes not further of the longi-
tude 70 W. Both the Purus and the Madeira are great
amazon rivers that today, even at the end of the dry season,
are important geographical barriers. Only a few structures
are outside of this area and most of them are either atypical
or misinterpreted when exploring remote images. The
latter is the case of Nak 02 RO that was visited by us, in the
2017 season, being considered as a false positive.
Earthen structures in western Amazonia have been
treated with some profusion in recent years (see Sau-
naluoma 2013 and Rampanelli 2016 for a complete list of
references) mainly due to the fact that their monumentality
is such that they can be discovered with some experience
and patience in, for instance, Google Earth (GE) or
Google Maps. This can be the origin of facing two paral-
lel planes in their knowledge, the rst one could called
the virtual plane and other one the ground truth. The rst
plane includes geoglyphs that have been remotely local-
ized mainly through the images of Google Earth and
which existence has been notied to the IPHAN in a
232
AGUSTÍN DIEZ CASTILLO, IVANDRA RAMPANELLI, TARSICIO JOSE GUALBERTO FERNANDES, FLUVIO DE SOUSA MASCARENHAS,
JORGE MARDINI SOBRINHO, EVANDRO ORFANÓ FIGUEIREDO
more or less formal manner. Not only GE images, whose
resolution is variable in this vast territory of the western
Amazonia, are used. Some have also been found with
other similar services like Apple Maps or Bing. Alceu
Ranzi and Nakahara have contributed with an important
number of structures to the current knowledge (Schaan et
al. 2010). When an earthen structure is remotely local-
ized it is labeled after the name of the person that have
discovered it, some additional information related to
their geographical position (RO = Rondonia and Amazo-
nas = AM, or BO = Bolivia) is added to the name. One of
the main drawbacks, of this method, is that there is not
way to know if an area has been already surveyed or not
(beyond the knowledge of each surveyor). Needless to say,
that there can be, and there is surely other people doing that
kind of survey, as a simple search for the terms geoglyphs
and Acre on YouTube show. Such a search provides tens of
videos related to the phenomenon uploaded for all kind of
people from journalists or scholars to volunteers.
To try to alleviate the problem of not knowing what
areas have been already surveyed, what we believe a new
strategy of consistent surveying has been designed. First
we have drawn virtual transects 200 m apart of each oth-
er in some areas. The results of the new method are being
tested on the territory of the Reserva extrativista Chico
Mendes. Transects are drawn into a Geographic Informa-
tion System within the area of interest (e.g. the Extractive
Reserve or a municipality) and then numbered and as-
signed to each surveyor. To perform the test in Resex
Chico Mendes the resulting transects were distributed
among a group of 10 students from the UFAC who will
participate in an introduction to eld archeology work-
shop during the rst semester of 2018. The practical im-
plementation of this simple task consists in providing
each one of the surveyors with a kml le with their
transects, although the task can also be performed from the
QGIS itself with the OSM plugin that lets to load satellite
images from different providers (Bing, Google Earth,
…). Another way to perform the task that requires a little
more of training before hand, it is loading the transects in
GPX format to the OpenStreetMap server. The advan-
tages of this system is that the structures located can be
drawn immediately in OpenStreetMap and thus be sub-
ject to audit not only by the project coordinators but also
from the community1. The horizon of this research team
is to replicate the tasking manager of the Human Open-
StreetMap Team (HOT).
In the second case, there are the monuments that have
been mainly visited by research teams coordinated by
Dra. Denise Schaan and Dr. Pärssinen (Schaan et al.
2010). Once these teams visited each site and gather
some initial measurements and a detailed description of the
structure they names are changed and their real existence
communicated to the IPHAN.
But back to the result of our work in the months of
October and November 2017 in the Brazilian states of
Rondonia and Acre, they include the discovery of a new
subquadrangular structure on the Santa Rosa land, inside
the Resex Chico Mendes (g. 2). It has a trench deeper
than the average one of 1,40 m (Rampanelli 2016), the
Fig. 2: Subquadrangular structure in Santa Rosa Colony (Reserva
extrativista Chico Mendes).
Fig. 1: Places cited in the text: 1) Nossa Senhora de Nazaré, 2) Chi-
quinho, 3) Piçarreira, 4) Xipamanú, 5) Santa Rosa.
233
PRELIMINARY RESULTS OF THE 2017 SEASON IN THE AMAZONIAN EARTHEN STRUCTURES KNOWN AS GEOGLYPHS
maximum width of the structure including the outer ends
of the external belt is 75 m. The width of the trench (as
measured between the top parts of the inner and outer
walls) varies between 13,5 m in the undisturbed part and
less that seven in the recently modied SE area.
The fact that this new monument is within the terri-
tory of the Reserva Extrativista Chico Mendes has im-
portant consequences because it is one of the few of a
total of 527 known geoglyphs, in the state of Acre, which
is on public land in a well protected area. That will allow
the IPHAN (Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage
of Brazil) to make immediate arrangements for their decla-
ration as part of the Brazilian list of archaeological
monuments, which would make it the rst archaeological
site of the Acre state to receive such protection.
A LIDAR ight has been carried out on the monu-
ment of Chiquinho (g. 3). The initial intention of this
kind of survey was simply to have a detailed topography
of it and analyze the costs of having it. Fortunately
enough, the treatment of the resulting digital terrain model
has revealed the potential of the method for detailed analy-
sis of the structures morphometry. After processing the
resulting data, the location of linear structures, that gives
the Chiquinho circle a character of a far more complex
structure that what was thought until now, has been re-
vealed. Those new features complete the northern part of
the monument (g. 3, d). The importance of such nding
lies in the fact that show that the structures located in re-
mote exploration could be more complex than previously
envisaged. The ground test at the site conrmed the existence
of earth walls highlighting the need to analyze, in some
detail, each one of the more than 800 geoglyphs known
until now. Before performing this precision surveying,
only one topography, performed with total station in the
monument of Tequinho, had been published (Saunaluo-
ma & Virtanen 2015) whose resolution, although not
Fig. 3: Chiquinho circle, in the
north part are clearly visible
the new structures located. a)
Current Maps Google view, b)
New ortophoto, c) Digital sur-
face model d) Chiquino after
processing the new data.
234
AGUSTÍN DIEZ CASTILLO, IVANDRA RAMPANELLI, TARSICIO JOSE GUALBERTO FERNANDES, FLUVIO DE SOUSA MASCARENHAS,
JORGE MARDINI SOBRINHO, EVANDRO ORFANÓ FIGUEIREDO
specied, is less than 1x1 m, compared to 2,5 cm x 2,5
cm of the Chiquinho one. In Tequinho and others struc-
tures some features beyond the limits of the main one,
namely roads and paths (Rampanelli et al. 2017) have
already been located.
Eventually, the eldwork was completed with three
visits to the Nossa Senhora de Nazaré (NSN) group. This
group is composed of three quadrangular structures
whose maximum size varies between 230 m and the 160
m. The most interesting of these three structures is the
NSN III is composed of two quadrangular structures sepa-
rated by a corridor of 20 meters on average (g. 4). We
have proceeded to propose that those monuments should
be registered by the IPHAN and from now on they should
be known as Nossa Senhora de Nazaré I (the one known as
Nakahara 15), Nossa Senhora de Nazaré II (Nakahara 16)
and Nossa Senhora de Nazaré III (before Nakahara 18).
In short, the work carried out by the multidisciplinary
research team led by the UVEG and the UFAC has shown
that there is still much of eld work to be done in the western
Amazonia earthen structures known as geoglyphs.
NOTE
1. Placing the fact that the rst commentary to mapping the San-
ta Rosa geoglyph at OpenStreetMaps occurs within hours of
the edition, demonstrates the potential of collaborative work
on the OpenStreetMap platform.
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ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Article
Full-text available
Esse artigo dedica-se a examinar com detalhes a arquitetura monumental dos geoglifos, gigantescos espaços de sociabilidade que demarcavam lugares e disciplinavam deslocamentos na Amazônia Ocidental pré-colombiana. Esses lugares são examinados sob a perspectiva da ecologia histórica, a partir da qual se entende os fenômenos produzidos pela relação dialética entre sociedades humanas e meio ambiente e que resultam na formação das paisagens como palimpsesto de eventos através de uma linha temporal. São examinados os possíveis usos e signifcados desses sítios, e a importância da arqueologia e geografa histórica para o entendimento da atual confguração paisagística da região. Além disso, esse estudo contribui para a compreensão das transformações socioculturais por que passaram as sociedades amazônicas sub-andinas durante os dois últimos milênios que antecederam a conquista européia.
Article
Full-text available
Amazonian archeology has experienced a new reality with the discovery of geoglyphs or earth structures delimited by ditches. Geoglifos, as they are called, are characterized as archaeological structures built by mostly continuous trenches forming enclosures of different geometric shapes and various sizes (<50 m to >200 m). In these structures there are paths or tracks that begin in the structure itself and are directed in several directions. Given the complexity of these structures and their paths, considering the different studies already published in this region, it can be said that these archaeological structures indicate the existence of an important population, organized regionally and that lived for hundreds of years in a habitat that previously was considered an inhospitable region for large populations.
Hot Tasking Manager. https://tasks.hotosm.org RAMPANELLI, I. (2016): Las estructuras de tierra delimitadas por zanjas en la Amazonía Occidental, Tesis Doctoral
HOT (2017): Hot Tasking Manager. https://tasks.hotosm.org RAMPANELLI, I. (2016): Las estructuras de tierra delimitadas por zanjas en la Amazonía Occidental, Tesis Doctoral, Universitat de Valencia (http://roderic.uv.es/bitstream/handle/10550/55877/TESIS_Ivandra_Rampanelli_2016.pdf).
Pre-columbian earthwork sites in the frontier region between Brazil and Bolivia, Southwestern Amazon, Tesis Doctoral
  • S Saunaluoma
SAUNALUOMA, S. (2013): Pre-columbian earthwork sites in the frontier region between Brazil and Bolivia, Southwestern Amazon, Tesis Doctoral, Universidad de Helsinki (https:// helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/40907/saunaluo-ma_dissertation.pdf).