اكتشاف مذهل تحت ظل الغابة: حضارة "أكويري" في الأمازون كانت موطناً لملايين البشر

Estimated peak population

• The study estimates that the Aquiry civilization reached a peak population of up to 3 million people around 200 CE .
• The civilization flourished from roughly 600 BCE to 850 CE, and its territory was approximately the size of modern-day Syria .
• The population supported itself across a network of settlements linked by roads and earthworks, representing what researchers describe as a form of low-density urbanism .

Key crops and ecosystem management practices

• The Aquiry practiced fire-managed agriculture: they burned bamboo-dominated forest to clear land for fields, primarily cultivating maize (corn) . Microbotanical evidence from related southwestern Amazon sites confirms maize as a staple, grown through sophisticated landscape engineering including drainage canals .
• Other cultivated plants likely included manioc (cassava), sweet potato, squash, and peach palm —a pattern of polyculture agroforestry well-documented across southern Amazonia .
• The earthworks themselves—geometric ditches, causeways, and platforms—served both ceremonial and practical functions, including water management, territorial demarcation, and possibly defensive purposes .

What it suggests about the myth of an untouched Amazonian wilderness

• The findings decisively refute the long-held myth of the Amazon as a "pristine" or "untouched" wilderness that was only sparsely occupied before European contact .
• Instead, the data reveal that millions of people lived in and actively shaped the southwestern Amazon for nearly 1,500 years, building tens of thousands of structures and managing forests through fire and cultivation .
• As one researcher put it, this "completely transformed my understanding" of the region's prehistory . The Aquiry did not merely adapt to the forest; they engineered the landscape at a massive scale, leaving a durable anthropogenic signature that persists in the modern canopy .
• The study also has contemporary relevance: recognizing the scale of pre-Columbian land use supports Indigenous land claims and challenges narratives that portray the Amazon as a wilderness empty of human history prior to colonialism .