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”WHEN FRANCISCO DE ORELLANA, A Spanish conquistador, paddled through the Amazon in 1541, he did not find El Dorado, the fabled kingdom of gold he had been looking for. But he did report to have found civilization: large villages and farms sprawled along the rivers, and even massive cities in the distance.
However, when later explorers and missionaries returned to the same spots centuries later, they found nothing but wild tangles of vegetation. Orellana’s reports were dismissed as bogus when scientists chimed in…
“But what archaeologists have been seeing in the last 30 years is that, quite the contrary—the Amazon has been densely occupied in the past,”…
One surprise has been the discovery of something that is, in some ways, much more valuable than the gold the Spanish had originally been looking for: terra preta de índio, “dark earth of the Indian,” a blend of charcoal and very nutrient-rich earth that is dark in color, and extraordinarily fertile—in stark contrast to the surrounding orange-yellowish, unproductive earth…”
Soil and Satellites Are Telling a New Story About Ancient Civilizations in the Amazon
Dr. Troglodyte
