top of page
Search

AMAZÔNIA

By Beatriz Magalhães & Laion Okuda

Level A2 Basic / B1 Intermediate


Image by AI
Image by AI

THE AMAZON WAS NOT EMPTY

For a long time, scientists believed the Amazon rainforest was too wild and empty for people to live in. But now, new research shows that the Amazon was home to many advanced civilizations. These people knew how to build, how to grow food, and most of all, how to live in harmony with nature. They were not “primitive.” They were knowledgeable, creative, and deeply connected to the land.


1. GEOGLYPHS AND ANCIENT ARCHITECTURE

In the Brazilian state of Acre, researchers discovered over 450 geoglyphs — giant shapes like circles and squares made in the earth. These were built between 200 and 1283 AD. Therefore, there are many others all over the Amazon region. To make them, people needed strong engineering skills, teamwork, and long-term planning. This shows that the Amazon had organized societies long before Europeans arrived.


2. LIDAR: TECHNOLOGY THAT SEES THROUGH TREES

Today, scientists are using Lidar — a laser scanning technology — to explore the inside of the Amazon rainforest. This technology has revealed lost cities like Landívar and Cotoca in Bolivia, and in the southern Amazon, especially in Alto do Rio Xingu. In Ecuador’s Upano Valley, researchers discovered a vast network of settlements. Cities like Kilamope and Sangay once housed between 15,000 and 30,000 people. These urban centers had roads, plazas, pyramids, and complex infrastructure, like modern cities. This has a big impact on our historical and cultural awareness about the Amazon: it wasn’t an untouched wilderness, but a carefully planned and vibrant region full of human life.


3. TERRA PRETA: THE GENIOUS OF BLACK EARTH

Terra preta (black earth) is not natural — it was made by ancient Indigenous people in the Amazon over 2.500 years ago. They mixed biochar (a type of charcoal), organic waste, and worked with soil microbes to make poor soil rich and fertile.


Today, scientists study terra preta to help repair damaged land, but the original terra preta is more than just soil, it is alive. It can heal itself, and nature alone can't create it. Indigenous people created it, who worked with the forest not against it. But do we give them credit correctly?


THINK ABOUT IT

After Europeans colonized Brazil, many indigenous people died from war and diseases brought by the colonizers. They didn’t have medicine for it. And then their culture was lost because their knowledge was oral, passed by stories and memory. The Amazon was built by human hands. Hands of a people that were later silenced, killed, and called savages.


So, we lost their names, their language, their secrets. But we still have their legacy: the forest. Did you learn this at school? Probably not — because many of these discoveries are recent, and the earlier scientists looked with a European point of view. But now we know better. And when we know better, we must act better.


We should stop repeating the same mistakes of our past. Everyone has the same value. We must look to our past to see how you will build our future. Do you still commit these same mistakes of our past? What kind of future do you want for our humanity?


KEY VOCABULARY: Geoglyphs, architecture, engineering, organized societies, Lidar, hidden, networks, inhabited, planned, Silenced, colonized, oral history, legacy, point of view.


REFERENCE:




 
 
 

Comments

bottom of page