The Amazon Rainforest is not usually a location where you would expect to find large ancient circles or henges. However, you would be wrong as the following article shows. Please note that these Amazonian henges are not in the main stone circles like the famous one at Stonehenge in England but are instead circles inscribed in the ground forming what are called geoglyphs. However, even in Britain, not all henges were made from stone since many were made from wood like Woodhenge, a Neolithic site close to Stonehenge that was constructed using timber posts.
Huge archaeology breakthrough as 'thousands of Stonehenges' found hidden in Amazon
Story by Max Channon for the Daily Express Newspaper
Aerial view of one of the the Amazonian henges
Thousands of earthworks similar to Britain's iconic and enigmatic Stonehenge have been found hidden deep in the Amazon rainforest.
Archaeologists once thought it was "impossible" for such structures to exist in the Amazon - and the scientist who helped discover them says they have turned our understanding of human history in the area "upside down". However, this incredible breakthrough is threatened by the same policies and practices that have been blamed for the destruction of an area of rainforest the size of Denmark in August alone.
Many of these mysterious mounds are more than 2,000 years old. And at least one of them is a stone circle - the Parque Arqueológico do Solstício in Brazil - that, like the world-famous moment in Wiltshire, was built to align with the sun on the solstices.
Archaeologists once thought it was "impossible" for such structures to exist in the Amazon - and the scientist who helped discover them says they have turned our understanding of human history in the area "upside down". However, this incredible breakthrough is threatened by the same policies and practices that have been blamed for the destruction of an area of rainforest the size of Denmark in August alone.
Many of these mysterious mounds are more than 2,000 years old. And at least one of them is a stone circle - the Parque Arqueológico do Solstício in Brazil - that, like the world-famous moment in Wiltshire, was built to align with the sun on the solstices.
Aerial view of two of the henges
Archaeologist Dr Alceu Ranzi helped discover the first of these earthworks, with the late Denise Schaan, in the 1970s. He told Express.co.uk: "It was my background [Degree] in Geography that allowed me to recognize the first geoglyph from the window of a jet while flying on the approach to Rio Branco airport."
"After that, I returned to the spot using a small airplane and we took pictures of the Geoglyph. When I showed the photograph to a famous archaeologist asking for his opinion, the answer was that this was impossible to exist in the Amazon."
Since then, more than 1,150 of these geoglyphs have been discovered - and it's believed thousands more are yet to be found. Dr Ranzi says Carbon 14 dating, using organic material excavated from the geoglyphs, shows many were built between 1,000 BC and 1,200 AD.
Dr Ranzi told Express.co.uk: "From the first flight, what caught my attention was the monumentality and the geometrical perfection of the structures. Squares and circles are more common in different sizes, from 50 to 300 meters."The Amazon Geoglyphs are spread out over a large area in southwestern Amazon, near the borders of Bolivia, Peru and Brazil. With aerial photography and the new LIDAR technology, the Amazon's archaeology has been turned upside down.
Dr Ranzi said these geoglyphs are "similar to the UK henges, without stones" and that the most "probable hypothesis" is that they were "for ceremonial purposes". He said they reveal that people have lived there for more than 2.000 years - and that "many useful trees in the forest were cultivated by the ancient people of the Amazon".
Asked how these ancient and lost civilizations were able to alter such a vast landscape without modern technology, Dr Ranzi said they were "smart people". He told Express.co.uk they needed "a perception of the terrain" and to understand the morphology of the landscape."
Dr Ranzi said these geoglyphs are "similar to the UK henges, without stones" and that the most "probable hypothesis" is that they were "for ceremonial purposes". He said they reveal that people have lived there for more than 2.000 years - and that "many useful trees in the forest were cultivated by the ancient people of the Amazon".
Asked how these ancient and lost civilizations were able to alter such a vast landscape without modern technology, Dr Ranzi said they were "smart people". He told Express.co.uk they needed "a perception of the terrain" and to understand the morphology of the landscape."
Map showing Geoglyph distribution in the Amazon
Dr Ranzi explained "the geometrical figures begin to show up" when developers started 'slash and burn' farming in vast swathes of the rainforest in the 1970s. He said: "Much of the Amazon is not and was not pristine forest. Just like today, the ancient inhabitants of the Amazon were able to modify and adapt the landscape to meet their needs for food, housing and security."
However today's developers pose a huge risk to both rainforest, our wider planet - and the henges of the Amazon that Dr Ranzi was the first to identify. He now hopes to secure recognition by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site - and prevent their destruction.
He told us: "It is a legacy of ancient Amazonian civilization that needs to be preserved. For that, we are asking friends and scholars for help and support on the subject."
"Destroying the Amazonian Geoglyphs even before they are studied would be a tragedy for the humanity. It would be the same as destroying a Picasso, or a Michelangelo - or even a Machu Picchu, or the Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids."
However today's developers pose a huge risk to both rainforest, our wider planet - and the henges of the Amazon that Dr Ranzi was the first to identify. He now hopes to secure recognition by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site - and prevent their destruction.
He told us: "It is a legacy of ancient Amazonian civilization that needs to be preserved. For that, we are asking friends and scholars for help and support on the subject."
"Destroying the Amazonian Geoglyphs even before they are studied would be a tragedy for the humanity. It would be the same as destroying a Picasso, or a Michelangelo - or even a Machu Picchu, or the Mayan or Egyptian Pyramids."
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So, who built these geoglyphs? Was it the ancestors of the Amerindian tribes who still live in the Amazon Rainforest today or some long lost civilisation? As I have mentioned in earlier posts, many of the Megalithic and Neolithic monuments found in Western Europe and the Mediterranean have been linked with giants, this includes Stonehenge, the monuments of Malta and ancient stone structures in Sardinia. Is there any evidence of giants in South America to whom these Amazonian geoglyphs could be linked? Well yes there is?
In my earlier post on The Epic Voyage of Meritaten, I mentioned that there was evidence for red-headed giants with large elongated skulls having being found in Peru (ref. the Paracas skulls whose DNA has been linked to the Middle East and to Scotland). I ventured that these could have been members of the giant red-haired Tuatha de Danann who had set off from Egypt/Canaan with Princess Meritaten's party but subsequently left the main group to head first for the Canary Islands and then on to South America where they migrated up the Amazon river to Peru. Perhaps some of them stayed in the Amazon Rainforest and constructed these geoglyphs, the oldest of which date back to at least 1,000 BC. Meritaten's era is normally dated to the mid-14th Century B.C., hence only a few centuries before the oldest of these structures were constructed. It is interesting to note that during Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan's famous voyage of circumnavigation of the globe in the 1520's, the Italian chronicler Antonio Pigafetta who sailed with Magellan relates how the crew encountered tall giants in what is now Patagonia in Argentina one of whom joined them but sadly died not long afterwards. These giants were meant to be twice the size of an average European of the time, making them around 11 ft tall, which coincidentally is the same size as the C's gave for the Kantekkian/Anunnaki giants or hybrids - A: Page 33. Blond and blue-eyed, of course! Before genetic alteration, one branch stood eleven feet tall. There is no doubt there could have been some exaggeration at play here but then in 1615, the Dutch circumnavigators Willem Schouten and Jacob Le Maire found graves containing human bones on the Patagonian shores… bones of beings which appeared to be ten or eleven feet tall… Today, these accounts are dismissed as fanciful tales with experts suggesting that the people Magellan's crew encountered were in reality the indigenous Tehuelche tribe, a Mapudungun word meaning ‘Fierce People’, who were known to have been about 4 inches taller than the average European of the time. So, you might argue 'nothing to see here' where giants are concerned save that we have the mystery of the Paracas skulls and extant Spanish colonists' accounts of encounters with giants in Peru in the 17th century.
Even if these 16th and 17th century European claims for the existence of giant humans in South America cannot be sustained or proven at this remove in time, there is another possibility as regards the presence of giants in the Amazon Rainforest who could have built these ancient geoglyphs and that is one proposed by the C's themselves:
Session 10 December 1994:
Q: (L) Was there an ancient advanced civilization located in the area we now call Antarctica?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) What was the name of this civilization?
A: Gor.
Q: (L) What kind of individuals lived in Gor?
A: 18 feet tall.
Q: (L) Were they humanoid and did they look like us?
A: Close.
Q: (L) Were they male and female like us?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) And did they have space travel capabilities?
A: No interest.
Q: (L) Are there any remains of their civilization left?
A: Yes.
Q: (L) Did they only inhabit Antarctica?
A: No.
Q: (L) Did they inhabit the whole world?
A: Close.
Q: (L) Are there any remains in Florida?
A: No.
Q: (L) Where might the remains be found
A: South America.
Q: (L) Where in South America?
A: Amazon. Ancient legend of Amazons.
So, could it have been the remnants of the Gor, the legendary Amazons, who constructed these numerous stone geoglyphs in the Amazon Rain Forest?
If the South American Gor giants lay behind the legend of the Amazons, then it is rather strange and difficult to explain how the legend should have surfaced in Europe in the age of classical Greece an ocean and a sea away.
In Greek mythology, the Amazons were a race of women warriors. The story of the Amazons probably originated as a variant of a tale recurrent in many cultures, that of a distant land organised opposite to one’s own. The ascribed habitat of the Amazons necessarily became more remote as Greek geographic knowledge developed. When the Black Sea region was colonised by Greeks, it was first said to be the Amazon district, but when no Amazons were found there, it was necessary to explain what had become of them.
Traditionally, one of the 12 labours required of the Greek hero Heracles (Hercules) was leading an expedition to obtain the girdle of Hippolyte, the queen of the Amazons, during which he was said to have conquered and expelled them from their district. Penthesilea also led an army of Amazons to fight for Troy against the Greeks, but she was killed by Achilles, who later mourned her.
As with Homer's tales of the Trojan War, the legend of the Amazons may have been inherited by the classical age Greeks from their distant ancestors. Could the legend have even dated back to Atlantean times I wonder?
According to some accounts, the Amazon River was so named by the 16th-century Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana for the fighting women he claimed to have encountered on what was previously known as the Marañon River.
And the legend of the Amazons lives on today in the comic book character of Diana Prince otherwise known as Wonder Woman, an Amazon princess from Paradise Island, a secluded island set in the middle of a vast ocean (Hmmm ... should this really be Antarctica?)
I don't know if the C's have ever expounded further on the Amazons. I am certainly not aware that they have. However, other evidence for a large scale, advanced civilisation existing within the Amazon Rain Forest has certainly been emerging in recent years. One proponent of this theory is English writer and researcher Graham Hancock.
Archaeologist says Amazon rainforest a man-made garden planted by vast lost civilisation
Story by Max ChannonControversial journalist and author Graham Hancock has suggested the Amazon rainforest was shaped by people using knowledge handed down to them by an advanced ancient civilization. Netflix has just scheduled the release of a second season of Hancock's series Ancient Apocalypse.
The first season of Ancient Apocalypse proposed human civilization was restarted after the last ice age by the survivors of an advanced civilisation that was all but destroyed by a cataclysm. It was branded the "most dangerous show on TV" by The Guardian's Stuart Heritage, who claimed the show "seems to exist solely for conspiracy theorists". [MJF: Unfortunately for Stuart Heritage, the C's seem to back Hancock for they have said that the Amerindian civilisations of Central and South America were the descendants of Atlantean survivors.]
This new series will explore Hancock's theory that Indigenous American cultures inherited a legacy of advanced scientific knowledge and sophisticated spiritual beliefs from a lost civilisation. Hancock advanced this claim in his 2019 book 'America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilisation'.
Hancock suggested that the Amazon rainforest is not entirely natural - and that it was, in fact, shaped by a 'lost' ancient civilisation from the ice age. Hancock points to the existence of huge earthworks and terra preta soil - a 5,000-year-old man-made fertile 'dark earth' - as evidence for this.
These claims have been supported, in part at least, by Ed Barnhart, an American archaeologist and explorer who specialises in ancient civilisations of the Americas. Speaking to computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Barnhart - who appears in the trailer for the new season of 'Ancient Apocalypse' - defended Hancock.
He described Hancock as "smart" and a "very good researcher". Barnhart said: "I think that he's very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with."
Barnhart agreed with Hancock's claims that the Amazon rainforest was planted by a lost civilisation. However, he told Fridman he disagreed with Hancock regarding the antiquity of this lost civilisation - and how advanced it may or may not have been.
When asked if he thought there were "lost civilisations in the history of humans on Earth which we don't know anything about", Barnhart - who is the founder and Director of the Maya Exploration Center - said: "Yes I do. And, in fact we, have found some civilisations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime.
"We've got Gobekli Tepe [an enigmatic 12,000 year old site in Turkey] and we've got the stuff that's going on in the Amazon and there are some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilisations we had no idea about. So yeah, it's happened."
Asked if he believed there was a lost civilisation in the Amazon that the rainforest "has eaten up" and hidden evidence of, Barnart replied: "Yes I do. We're beginning to find it.
"There are these huge what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe when they hear the word civilisation they think of something that looks like Rome and I don't think we're ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon." [MJF: Who knows that we won't given how current satellite imaging is revolutionising archaeology and revealing sites that once contained sophisticated structures that have previously eluded archaeologists working on the ground. My advice would be to keep looking!]
Talking about the ideas espoused by Hancock, Fridman asked Barnhart: "He's proposed it's possible that the Amazon jungle is sort of a man-made garden, so it was planted there by an advanced ancient civilisation. Is there any degree to which that could be possible?"
Barnhart replied: "Frankly, I agree with him... It's the conclusion part that we differ from, sure, but the facts that he's basing that on are tera pretta, are the huge geometric earthworks - there are ever-increasing evidence of them.
"They're everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilisation that was there. How advanced they were is a question - and also, you know, a perspective thing."
Barnhart, however, does not support Hancock's theory that a lost civilisation from the last ice age 'seeded' all of the world's civilisations. He said: "We could have the story wrong, but one thing we're real good at is finding stuff. [MJF: We know from the C's that Atlantean survivors and their descendants did emerge in different parts of the world to reboot civilisation at different times and at different rates.]
"I mean, we find fish scales - so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilisation that was that technologically advanced and that large, that we can't even find a pot shard from."
Professor John W Hoopes directs the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas. He agrees that the Amazon rainforest was shaped by the actions of human hands thousands of years ago - but he says they were the hands of sophisticated indigenous farmers.
A specialist in pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures in Latin America, Hoopes is a long-term critic of Hancock's work. He exclusively explained to The Express why he finds the phrase 'advanced ancient civilisation' "highly problematic".
"The word 'advanced' is a legacy of Victorian-era unilineal cultural evolution, the notion that cultures advance along a trajectory from savagery to civilisation," said Hoopes. "They don't. It's far more complicated than that.
"'Civilisation' can be summarised in two words: 'like us'. If there is something in a culture that we can recognize as being like ourselves, we are willing to bestow upon them the identity of 'civilisation'.
These claims have been supported, in part at least, by Ed Barnhart, an American archaeologist and explorer who specialises in ancient civilisations of the Americas. Speaking to computer scientist and podcaster Lex Fridman, Barnhart - who appears in the trailer for the new season of 'Ancient Apocalypse' - defended Hancock.
He described Hancock as "smart" and a "very good researcher". Barnhart said: "I think that he's very well-read, in fact, better read than a lot of my colleagues, but his conclusions I disagree with."
Barnhart agreed with Hancock's claims that the Amazon rainforest was planted by a lost civilisation. However, he told Fridman he disagreed with Hancock regarding the antiquity of this lost civilisation - and how advanced it may or may not have been.
When asked if he thought there were "lost civilisations in the history of humans on Earth which we don't know anything about", Barnhart - who is the founder and Director of the Maya Exploration Center - said: "Yes I do. And, in fact we, have found some civilisations that we had no idea about just in my lifetime.
"We've got Gobekli Tepe [an enigmatic 12,000 year old site in Turkey] and we've got the stuff that's going on in the Amazon and there are some other less startling things that we had no idea existed and push our dates back and give us whole new civilisations we had no idea about. So yeah, it's happened."
Asked if he believed there was a lost civilisation in the Amazon that the rainforest "has eaten up" and hidden evidence of, Barnart replied: "Yes I do. We're beginning to find it.
"There are these huge what we call geoglyphs, these mound groups that are in geometric patterns. I think that the average Joe when they hear the word civilisation they think of something that looks like Rome and I don't think we're ever going to find anything that looks like Rome in the Amazon." [MJF: Who knows that we won't given how current satellite imaging is revolutionising archaeology and revealing sites that once contained sophisticated structures that have previously eluded archaeologists working on the ground. My advice would be to keep looking!]
Talking about the ideas espoused by Hancock, Fridman asked Barnhart: "He's proposed it's possible that the Amazon jungle is sort of a man-made garden, so it was planted there by an advanced ancient civilisation. Is there any degree to which that could be possible?"
Barnhart replied: "Frankly, I agree with him... It's the conclusion part that we differ from, sure, but the facts that he's basing that on are tera pretta, are the huge geometric earthworks - there are ever-increasing evidence of them.
"They're everywhere. Every time we open up the jungle we find these big works. So yes, there was a vast civilisation that was there. How advanced they were is a question - and also, you know, a perspective thing."
Barnhart, however, does not support Hancock's theory that a lost civilisation from the last ice age 'seeded' all of the world's civilisations. He said: "We could have the story wrong, but one thing we're real good at is finding stuff. [MJF: We know from the C's that Atlantean survivors and their descendants did emerge in different parts of the world to reboot civilisation at different times and at different rates.]
"I mean, we find fish scales - so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilisation that was that technologically advanced and that large, that we can't even find a pot shard from."
Professor John W Hoopes directs the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program at the University of Kansas. He agrees that the Amazon rainforest was shaped by the actions of human hands thousands of years ago - but he says they were the hands of sophisticated indigenous farmers.
A specialist in pre-Hispanic indigenous cultures in Latin America, Hoopes is a long-term critic of Hancock's work. He exclusively explained to The Express why he finds the phrase 'advanced ancient civilisation' "highly problematic".
"The word 'advanced' is a legacy of Victorian-era unilineal cultural evolution, the notion that cultures advance along a trajectory from savagery to civilisation," said Hoopes. "They don't. It's far more complicated than that.
"'Civilisation' can be summarised in two words: 'like us'. If there is something in a culture that we can recognize as being like ourselves, we are willing to bestow upon them the identity of 'civilisation'.
"The term has become practically meaningless in archaeology. It is also used to sensationalise."
Regarding ancient agriculture in the Amazon, Hoopes told The Express: "The ancient people of Amazonia used 'terra preta' - black earth technology - to convert heavily weathered, tropical soils into fertile, carbon and nutrient-rich soils that were extremely fertile. This was done over an extensive territory along the Amazon and its tributaries.
"The rich biodiversity of Amazon rainforest habitats today is due in large part to the high fertility of anthropogenic [human made] soils created over millennia by Indigenous farmers of South America. When their populations declined dramatically as a result of pandemics and genocide that followed European colonisation [MJF: How can he be sure those processes were not already operative even before the first Europeans arrived? Moreover, the C's suggested that most of the Mayans in Central America had been taken off planet by the 4D Lizards at some stage. Could the same fate have occurred to the Amerindians of the Amazon Rainforest?], the rainforest rebounded, growing even more luxuriantly, because of the high fertility of these human-enhanced soils.
"Those anthropogenic black earth soils were created gradually and over many generations and thousands of years. Another method of agricultural enhancement was raised and drained fields - camellones or waru waru - used to convert wetlands into fertile farmlands. These also became quickly and densely overgrown when they were abandoned due to population decline.
"The rich biodiversity of Amazon rainforest habitats today is due in large part to the high fertility of anthropogenic [human made] soils created over millennia by Indigenous farmers of South America. When their populations declined dramatically as a result of pandemics and genocide that followed European colonisation [MJF: How can he be sure those processes were not already operative even before the first Europeans arrived? Moreover, the C's suggested that most of the Mayans in Central America had been taken off planet by the 4D Lizards at some stage. Could the same fate have occurred to the Amerindians of the Amazon Rainforest?], the rainforest rebounded, growing even more luxuriantly, because of the high fertility of these human-enhanced soils.
"Those anthropogenic black earth soils were created gradually and over many generations and thousands of years. Another method of agricultural enhancement was raised and drained fields - camellones or waru waru - used to convert wetlands into fertile farmlands. These also became quickly and densely overgrown when they were abandoned due to population decline.
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You will note that the C's confirmed that the Gor giants were an ancient advanced civilisation who once occupied the Amazon. So, is it possible that the Gor were the first to create the rich biodiversity of the Amazon Rainforest that exists today and did the Amazon Amerindians inherit their legacy?
