A Forgotten Civilization in the Amazon

Guest: Jonas Gergorio de Souza, PhD, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Archaeology, University of Exeter The Amazon rainforest is crucial to the health of our planet – it converts a huge amount of carbon dioxide into oxygen and houses more than half the world's species of plants and animals. It’s also an increasingly rich trove of archaeological information. Using satellite imagery, researchers at the University of Exeter have uncovered a bustling corridor of ancient settlements deep in the Amazon rainforest. Archaeologists long assumed people only settled along major rivers in the Amazon. The land deeper into the forest was just too overgrown and inhospitable, they thought.