Paths from Babel: All the way to Amazonia

Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

Genesis 11:9

 

"LiDAR (light detection and ranging) has documented 26 settlement sites, including two remarkably large, of the Casarabe culture in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia. The discovery challenges the view of Amazonia as a historically pristine landscape, but was instead home to an early urbanism created and managed by indigenous populations for thousands of years.

They found an unprecedented array of elaborate and intricate structures unlike any previously discovered in the region, including 5-m-high terraces and 21-m-tall conical pyramids.

“Our LiDAR system has revealed built terraces, straight causeways, enclosures with checkpoints, and water reservoirs,” Professor Iriarte said. “There are monumental structures are just a mile apart

connected by 965 km of canals long raised causeways connecting sites, reservoirs and lakes.” 

The central role of Cotoca as a primary site is also underlined by the impressive system of canals and causeways that radiate from the base platform in all of the cardinal directions, connecting with lower-tier sites, the Ibare River to the south, and lakes to the east.

This region was one of the earliest occupied by humans in Amazonia, where people started to domesticate crops of global importance such as manioc and rice.

The architectural layout of Casarabe culture large settlement sites indicates that the inhabitants of this region created a new social and public landscape.

The orientation of the buildings that constitute the civic-ceremonial centers of the two large settlement sites is very uniform towards the north-northwest. This probably reflects a cosmological world view, which is also present in the orientation of extended burials of the Casarabe culture."

SciNews/Nature