Love how ‘everyone just knew’ there weren’t any large ancient civilizations in the Amazon even though they’d never bothered looking. Glad someone is finally setting the record straight.
Thats what happens to a city taken back by nature and lying undisturbed for 500+ years… there is a reason why the only preserved Roman ruin cities are in the Sahara or next to the Mount Vesuvius
The settlement is right at the border of what would be controlled by the Inca government, two millenniums later. It shows that there’s some decent access to the region from the west than you’d be led to believe, with the Andes in the way.
As such, if they find other cities further east, I’m predicting that, culturally speaking, they’ll resemble nothing this one; even if they happen to be roughly the same size.
People ate maize and sweet potato, and probably drank “chicha”, a type of sweet beer.
“If you don’t have chicha, any small thing will do.” (reference to a certain song)
Serious now. Potentially yucca too - it grows right next door, and if they got maize from North America then they likely traded for crops.
Hadrian was a big fan of this sort of large, public project. Besides the aqueduct there’s also Hadrian’s Wall (right at the border of Rome with the Picts, in Britannia) and the temple for Venus and Roma in the city.
Although… what interested me the most in the article wasn’t this sort of modern stuff, it was
the remains [in Greece] of a prehistoric settlement thought to be from the Bronze Age, roughly 2600 to 2300 B.C.
That’s an interesting period of the peninsula, as it was likely already Indo-Europeanised, but not Hellenised. Proto-Greek would be a bit after that, starting around 2200 BCE; but you already had Illyrian, Messapic, Thracian, Dacian, and perhaps Phrygian. (It’s kind of hard to know if they’re part of the same IE branch, or if similarities between them are areal. Greek in special borrowed quite a bit from native languages.)
Are they saying that the initial spread of millet was the sticky variety, and the non-sticky variant was created locally by people favoring bread? Or did the non-sticky variant spread first, and the sticky variant arose later but only replaced the earlier variant where people preferred porridge?
archaeology
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