Other River Valley Civilizations

Parmenio said:

That occurred decades later?

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Tennenbaum said:

Pretty much put an end to it, though.

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Parmenio said:

True. I feel like we are forgetting an important one somewhere... (?)

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Parmenio said:

True. I feel like we are forgetting an important one somewhere... (?)

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Parmenio said:

The Sudanic civilizations of West Africa.

The Nubian civilization south of Egypt.

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Qymaen said:

I don't think the Tiber developed an RVC because of the fact that the furthest the boot is from the Tyrrhenian to the Adriatic is only a few hours. Also there is the fact that the Tiber isn't very far.

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Parmenio said:

Well, The Aztec Empire centered upon a lake, so it is similar.

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WASHINGTON - The Amazon River basin was not all a pristine, untouched wilderness before Columbus came to the Americas, as was once believed. Researchers have uncovered clusters of extensive settlements linked by wide roads with other communities and surrounded by agricultural developments.

The researchers, including some descendants of pre-Columbian tribes that lived along the Amazon, have found evidence of densely settled, well-organized communities with roads, moats and bridges in the Upper Xingu part of the vast tropical region.

Michael J. Heckenberger, first author of the study appearing last week in the journal Science, said the ancestors of the Kuikuro people in the Amazon basin had a ``complex and sophisticated'' civilization with a population of many thousands during the period before 1492.

``These people were not the small mobile bands or simple dispersed populations'' that some earlier studies had suggested, he said.

Instead, the people demonstrated sophisticated levels of engineering, planning, cooperation and architecture in carving out of the tropical rain forest a system of interconnected villages and towns making up a widespread culture based on farming.

Heckenberger said the society that lived in the Amazon before Columbus was overlooked by experts because they did not build the massive cities and pyramids and other structures common to the Mayans, Aztecs and other pre-Columbian societies in South America.

Instead, they built towns, villages and smaller hamlets all laced together by precisely designed roads, some more than 50 yards across, that went in straight lines from one point to another.

``They were not organized in cities,'' Heckenberger said. ``There was a different pattern of small settlements, but they were all tightly integrated."

He said the population in one village and town complex was 2,500 to 5,000 people, but that could be just one of many complexes in the Amazon region.

``All the roads were positioned according to the same angles, and they formed a grid throughout the region,'' he said. Only a small part of these roads has been uncovered, and it is uncertain how far the roads extend, but the area studied by his group is a grid 15 miles by 15 miles, he said.

Heckenberger said the people did not build with stone, as did the Mayas, but made tools and other equipment of wood and bone. Such materials quickly deteriorate in the tropical forest, unlike more durable stone structures. Building stones were not readily available along the Amazon, he said.

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Because of this geography, Beni was a very important center of pre-Colombian civilization known as the hydraulic culture of Las Lomas (the hills), a culture that constructed over 20,000 man-made artificial hills, all interconnected by thousands of square kilometers of aqueducts, channels, embankments, artificial lakes and lagoons, and terraces. Between about 4000 BC (and probably earlier as this date is taken from ceramics that have been carbon dated) and the 13th Century AD this region was settled by important and organized groups of human societies. Their civil structures were based, both environmentally and economically, on the use of specific environmental characteristics (such as the use of aquatic plants as fertilizer, and enormous fishing systems they constructed). You can still see miles and miles of these channels and man-made hills if you fly low over Beni. The BBC recently ran an article about how amazingly, many farmers in Beni are now going BACK to this system of agriculture and irrigation. That's because Beni floods seasonally and in recent years the floods have been especially damaging. So people are going back to ancient wisdom to find solutions to modern problems.

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mingming said:

Wait but weren't Aztecs from somewhere else?
They only came to the lake in search of the eagle with the snake on top of the cactus. At least that was what I've been told.

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Agriculture around the lake began about 7,000 years BP,[2] with humans following the patterns of periodic inundations of the lake.
On the northeast side of the lake, between 1700 and 1250 BCE, several villages appear. By 1250 BCE, the identifying signs of the Tlatilco culture, including more complex settlements and a stratified social structure, are seen around the lake. By roughly 800 BCE, Cuicuilco had eclipsed the Tlatilco cultural centers and was the major power in the Valley of Mexico during the next 200 years, when its famous conical pyramid was built. The Xitle volcano destroyed Cuicuilco around 30 CE, a destruction that may have given rise to Teotihuacan.

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Qymaen said:

I hope these help:

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Zeno said:

People would settle along rivers or lakes for obvious reasons. (to make beer! jk jk) So if there were people and there was a river there was a civ.

About pre-Columbian civilizations along the Amazon river:

Amazon Cities Before Columbus

The Beni civilization of Bolivia, which used irrigation extensively:



Beautiful Beni, Bolivia's Tropical Paradise. Read About its History and Culture.

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