Contours of the Past: LiDAR Data Expands the Limits of Late Pre-Columbian Human Settlement in the Santarém Region, Lower Amazon

Belterra Plateau sites occupied ca. AD 1300 to seventeenth-century colonization, with dark earths, ponds, and trodden roads

what the source states

"…numerous archaeological sites, dating from ca. A.D. 1300 up to the time of European colonization in the seventeenth century, have been found in an upland area known as the Belterra Plateau, south of the present-day city of Santarém." Sites are "typically characterized by large quantities of pottery sherds… as well as extensive areas of anthropogenic soils (Terra Preta/Terra Mulata or Amazonian Dark Earth)," with "enclosed depressions, as well as ponds and trodden roads."