Ring villages by Wüst and Barreto

Wüst and Barreto 1999:16

This map shows an example of a ring village from Southern Brazil, described by Irmhild Wüst and Christiana Barreto, in an article in Latin American Antiquity *. Many of the earthworks are about 100 to 200 yards across, and several dozen of them are described and mapped. In the article they call on Amazonian archaeologists to investigate the distribution of this kind of occupation across the Amazon, the role such rings might have played in the pre-Columbian past, and their relationship to the ethnographic record. Many archaeologists have taken up this challenge, both in Brazil and Bolivia. As the rainforest is cleared, more and more of these landscape features become visible from satellite imagery. 

[*(Wüst, Irmheld and Cristiana Barreto, 1999, The Ring Villages of Central Brazil: A Challenge for Amazonian Archaeology, Latin American Antiquity 10(1):3-23)]