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Amazon "Stonehenge" found in Brazil
Source: Globe and Mail

Archaeologists discovered a pre-colonial astrological observatory that could be 2,000 years old in the Amazon basin near French Guiana.

"Only a society with a complex culture could have built such a monument," archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral of the Amapa Institute of Scientific and Technological Research (IEPA), told the newspaper O Globo.

The observatory was built of 127 blocks of granite each three meters high and placed in regular circles in an open field, she said.

Cabral said the site resembles a temple which could have been used as an observatory, because the blocks are positioned to mark the winter solstice. In December, the path of the sun allows rays to pass through a hole in one of the blocks, possibly to calculate agriculture and religious rituals.

Its exact age has been difficult to determine, but based on ceramic fragments found nearby, archaeologists estimate it is between 500 and 2,000 years old.

The discovery is in Calcoene, near Brazil's border with French Guyana.

Archaeologists said the find holds mysteries similar to Stonehenge, in Salisbury, England, another monument of huge stones whose purpose is unclear. AFP