'The rock art gave me goosebumps': discovering the Amazon's lost archaeology
Archaeologist and palaeoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi explains the significance of new discoveries in the rainforest
By Olivia Gavoyannis
November 26, 2020 8:06 pm
Updated November 27, 2020 5:13 pm
In Jungle Mystery, Ella Al-Shamahi explores the archaeology of the Amazon
Looking down from a helicopter on its dense carpet of trees, it’s easy to imagine that the Amazon rainforest has always been like this – wild and untameable. Historians always assumed that little more than a handful of small, nomadic tribes ever lived in this extraordinary environment.
But laser technology has been helping archaeologists search beneath the trees on airborne expeditions in Brazil, Bolivia and Colombia. They have uncovered the remains of ancient settlements from 2,000 years ago, which can then be examined on the ground.
The dense tropical forest of the Amazon has meant that many of its historic secrets have remained hidden (Photo: Getty)
Among those amazed by the new discoveries is British archaeologist and palaeoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi. When she trekked into the forest, she was astonished to find giant geometric shapes carved into the landscape, ditches and roads that reveal a lost jungle metropolis, cultivated Brazil nut trees and what is now thought to be South America’s largest site of prehistoric artworks, with hundreds of intricate paintings.
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Telling another side of history
Archaeology is shedding new light on the tribes’ oral histories of their once vast civilisations. “The idea that this story of the Amazon is not the story that we think it is blew my mind,” Al-Shamahi tells i. “History is often told by a group of people and we don’t necessarily listen to indigenous voices.
“We were able to show that some of their stories really line up. One indigenous group had stories of really large settlements, and when the archaeologists started looking… they found the same small settlements they live in now – but sprawled in a much larger landscape”.
More:
https://inews.co.uk/culture/television/jungle-mystery-lost-kingdoms-of-the-amazon-interview-ella-al-shamahi-archaeology-773932?ITO=newsnow
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Since I was quite young. My sister read Greek mythology to me for bedtime stories and she handed of several of her books when she was done with them when she was in college. When I finally went to college, I was well beyond my 20s, I got a degree in cultural anthropology. I was thinking of archaeology but I found culture and language more interesting and less physically demanding.
But I am a political animal too so I got another degree in political science. An odd duck but I found that most of my faculty friends all agreed that I was a true eclectic and I decided that it was something to be embraced. My interests are vast and I had a hard time deciding what to study, being older upon entry was any more helpful than being a teen right out of high school.
Now I'm retired, so I do a lot of armchair work these days. 
Last edited Tue Dec 1, 2020, 07:14 AM - Edit history (1)
living with us in my childhood. She had some Hungarian friends who knew German and they used to sit on our front porch speaking German although they were all fluent in English. There were older Italians in our neighborhood who had come to the US around the same time as Aunt Emma and her Hungarian friends - late 1800's and early 1900's. They sat on their front porches speaking Italian. Felt like I needed a passport to walk down the street.
My father's mother was mixed, English, Seneca, and Mohawk. She died when I was 2 but my aunts told me about her and showed me Native crafts her grandmother had made and taught her to make. When my grandfather started dating, he had a long term relationship with a Jewish woman who was at all our family gatherings. The first time we met her was at our traditional huge family Christmas party at the farm. She explained Hannukah to us and handed out Hannukah gelt (chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil) to all the grandchildren.
When I learned to read and saw words I didn't understand, my father showed me how to use a dictionary. A few years later, when I asked what the stuff in parentheses after words meant, my mother explained that it told where the word originated. So I read those every time, too, along with the section on language families. Probably the only kid who read dictionaries as a pasttime.
I took German and Latin in high school to have a basis for most European languages, and Spanish in college.
Dalya Alberge
Sun 29 Nov 2020 05.00 EST
Tens of thousands of ice age paintings across a cliff face shed light on people and animals from 12,500 years ago
One of the world’s largest collections of prehistoric rock art has been discovered in the Amazonian rainforest.
Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia.
Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.
These animals were all seen and painted by some of the very first humans ever to reach the Amazon. Their pictures give a glimpse into a lost, ancient civilisation. Such is the sheer scale of paintings that they will take generations to study.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chapel-of-the-ancients-rock-art-discovered-in-remote-amazon-forest
This video is from Colombia but I'm shoving it in here as it is beautiful!