Connecting Two Realms
Archaeologists rethink the early civilizations of the Amazon
By ROGER ATWOOD
Monday, June 12, 2017
A spiral temple sits atop a 3,000-year-old burial mound known as Montegrande in northern Peru’s Amazon region.
The Amazon jungle wasn’t supposed to have been the site of something this big. The mound, known locally as Montegrande, spans more than two acres at its base and stands as tall as a five-story building. It sits today amid rice paddies and cow pastures outside the Peruvian city of Jaén. Although it was overgrown with bushes and taken for a natural hill by people living nearby, the few archaeologists who had ventured to this remote corner of the western Amazon basin could not ignore the fact that it bore the features of an ancient burial mound: It had steep sides and a round shape, and there are no other hills around it.
http://www.archaeology.org/issues/266-1707/letter-from/5653-letter-from-peru-spiral-temples
