Archaeological digs in Amazon provide clues about Indigenous inhabitants before colonization

MACAPA, Brazil (AP) — Paving roads in the Amazon rainforest has long brought deforestation that threatens the people who live there. The same roadwork, however, has also allowed archaeologists to get glimpses of the region’s past long before Europeans arrived to reshape it.

The construction often requires archaeological surveys before the paving starts, and some of the latest discoveries have emerged along the BR-156 highway in Brazil's northern state of Amapa. Among the findings so far from nine dig sites: pottery vases that may be funerary urns, as well as small artifacts that resemble human faces.

“What we now about the region’s past is also tied to the opening created by these projects, which gives our relationship with them a somewhat ambivalent character,” said Lúcio Flávio Costa Leite, who manages the Archaeological Research Center at Amapa’s Institute for Scientific and Technological Research. “At the same time, the knowledge we gain about these sites leads us to pay closer attention to these regions, including by adopting permanent protection measures.”

Scientists say recent research has reinforced understanding of the region's past not as a human desert, but rather as a landscape shaped by interconnected societies long before Columbus arrived. The material found along BR-156, for example, included pottery in multiple styles and techniques that reflected influences from communities ranging from Brazil’s Para state to the Caribbean.

It's been cleaned and analyzed by a team working for the National Department of Transport Infrastructure. One of the archaeologists, Manoel Fabiano da Silva Santos, said the layers of the Amazon soil he excavated are a historic timeline.

In the upper layers, he found items such as Portuguese porcelain and nails linked to European occupation.

“Digging deeper, we uncovered pottery and ceramics associated with earlier Indigenous presence, marking the site’s transition before and after the arrival of colonizers,” Santos said.

The artifacts will eventually go to Amapa's state collection, overseen by Costa Leite, which includes about 530,000 pieces. The oldest piece is around 6,140 years old, confirming a long human presence across Amapa, he said.

The artifacts offer insight into how ancient Indigenous societies lived, died and interacted with the rainforest.

“Here is something I often debate with my students -- we usually think of technology as computers and microchips,” Costa Leite said, walking through shelves of ancient pottery. “But all of this required careful reading of the landscape and deliberate choices of materials.”

One of the most impressive historic areas in Amapa is in the city of Calcoene, where a 1,000‑year‑old stone monument made up of 127 carved monoliths arranged in a circle about 30 meters (98 feet) in diameter, set in open grassland amid the rainforest and bordered by a slow river.

Some have dubbed the Archaeological Park of the Solstice the “Stonehenge of the Amazon” for its resemblance to the British monument. Researchers found that the stones were positioned so that during the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere they marked the exact point where the sun rises, said archaeologist Mariana Petry Cabral, a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais who was part of the team that began digging at the site some two decades ago.

“It’s hard to say exactly what all the stones mean, but what we do know is that they are not from the site itself. They were brought from other nearby locations,” she said.

Subsequent research and excavations found the site also served as a burial ground. Radiocarbon dating showed it was occupied for hundreds of years, beginning around 1,100 years ago, she said.

The site, discovered by scientists in 2005, can be visited with prior approval from Amapa’s Institute for Scientific and Technological Research. At the same time, the site is going through the process to become a national park, which will allow more people to visit.

Such archaeological sites are protected by Brazilian law, which prohibits them being altered. That adds a layer of protection for surrounding rainforest.

Modern archaeological and historical ecology research shows that Indigenous peoples not only lived in the Amazon for centuries but also shaped it. They managed and cultivated the landscape through long‑term, sustainable practices, said Eduardo Neves, an archaeologist professor at the University of Sao Paulo.

Neves has studied the Amazon rainforest for more than 30 years and, since 2023, has led the Amazon Revealed project, which uses satellite scans to identify archaeological sites hidden beneath the forest canopy.

Scans have revealed roads linking archaeological sites and buried patterns in the rainforest that point to repeated occupation and deliberate landscape modification. Together, Neves said, the features suggest large settlements.

Archaeologists had long suspected such connections, Neves added, but technology has made it possible to see their broader geographic reach. The scans show networks of roads connecting clusters of settlements across the forest, most clearly in southern Amazonas state and Acre.

“When people think of an Indigenous tribe, they often imagine a small village isolated in the middle of the forest. But evidence shows a high degree of interconnectivity linking different settlements,” Neves said.

“Amapa is a key piece that helps us see how dynamic and active these populations were, and how they maintained networks of exchange that have been in place for millennia,” Cabral said.

Felipe Campos Mello contributed reporting.

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The Archaeological Park of the Solstice, which some call the "Stonehenge of the Amazon" is visible in Calcoene, Amapa state, Brazil, Friday, March 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Archaeologists conduct a technical visit at the Quintela site in the Vila Nova community along the BR-156 highway in Santana, Amapa state, Brazil, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

The Archaeological Park of the Solstice, which some call the "Stonehenge of the Amazon" is visible in Calcoene, Amapa state, Brazil, Friday, March 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Vehicles drive on a fully paved section of BR-156 highway that connects the state capital Macapa with the city of Oiapoque, Amapa state, Brazil, Monday, March 9, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Archaeologists conduct a technical visit at the Quintela site in the Vila Nova community along the BR-156 highway in Santana, Amapa state, Brazil, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

A pottery vessel with anthropomorphic features believed to be an urn is displayed at the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research in Macapa, Amapa state, Brazil, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Archaeologist Manoel Fabiano da Silva Santos shows an anthropomorphic artifact found at the Quintela archaeological site at the National Department of Transport Infrastructure in Macapa, Amapa state, Brazil, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

An anthropomorphic ceramic figurine found during archaeological work in a state is displayed at the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research in Macapa, Amapa state, Brazil, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Archaeologist Lucio Flavio Costa Leite speaks about the collection of cataloged archaeological artifacts at the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research in Macapa, Amapa state, Brazil, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Pottery vessels with anthropomorphic features believed to be urns are displayed at the Institute for Scientific and Technological Research in Macapa, Amapa state, Brazil, Sunday, March 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Archaeologist Manoel Fabiano da Silva Santos shows a soil layer scale while explaining the historical timeline at National Department of Transport Infrastructure in Macapa, Amapa state, Brazil, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Archaeologists conduct a technical visit at Quintela archaeological site in the Vila Nova community along the BR-156 highway in Santana, Amapa state, Brazil, Saturday, March 14, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Grass and flowers surround the Archaeological Park of the Solstice, which some call the "Stonehenge of the Amazon" in Calcoene, Amapa state, Brazil, Friday, March 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

OSLO, Norway (AP) — Navi Pillay, a South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief whose career has spanned from defending the rights of an imprisoned Nelson Mandela to leading a panel that found that Israel committed genocide in Gaza, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for her efforts to promote international law as it comes under attack.

Her win is sure to be seen as a high-profile rebuke to U.S. President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who have both rejected the findings of the U.N. commission she led on Gaza. The leaders also have been highly critical of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; Pillay has worked at both.

Pillay’s work “is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world,” said Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, in announcing her win in Oslo, Norway, as part of the peace prize’s 125th anniversary.

The committee said it sought to strengthen international law at a time of conflict, and Watne Frydnes said Pillay’s award was a message to those seeking to undermine “the international rules-based system and the institutions.”

In places such as Israel and in apartheid-era South Africa, she and peers took on some of the world’s most painful and sensitive legal issues and most vulnerable populations.

Pillay, 85, received the news while attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, where the trials of Nazi war criminals helped lay the foundations of international law. She was in the same room where the trials were held when prize was announced in Norway.

“Perhaps it was meant to be that I was in this historic Courtroom 600” of the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, she said.

She said efforts to weaken international criminal justice “endanger the progress painstakingly made since Nuremberg, and they risk returning us to a world in which power, rather than law, determines whose suffering matters.”

World leaders, she added, have a “legal obligation to protect human rights and refrain from war.”

Pillay chaired the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel, which was created by the U.N.-backed Human Rights Council. The commission a year ago concluded Israel was responsible for genocide in Gaza with a specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.

Gaza was among Pillay’s first comments Friday after hearing she had won. “What’s happening there is genocide,” she said in Germany, to more applause.

The commission last year also found that the Israeli president, prime minister and former defense minister "have incited the commission of genocide.” Israel, which has refused to cooperate with the commission since it was established in 2021, has strenuously denied the accusations.

Pillay has repeatedly rebuffed critics who accused her of antisemitism or turning a blind eye to the Hamas attacks in Israel. Under her leadership, the commission also issued reports accusing Hamas of war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law during its Oct. 7, 2023, attack.

In an interview with The Associated Press last year, she recalled how she worked closely with some Jewish lawyers in the fight against apartheid in her native South Africa and was invited to Israel as the U.N. rights chief from 2008 to 2014.

Growing up under the harsh system of segregation influenced Pillay's interest in human rights and the law. Starting with Mandela’s presidency, South Africa’s government has openly compared the situation faced by nonwhite people during apartheid to the Palestinians’ plight.

“We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians,” Mandela said soon after apartheid ended.

The Nobel announcement came at another critical time for Gaza, just two days after the anniversary of the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, that killed about 1,200 people and sparked the war. Over 74,000 Palestinians have since been killed, with their territory devastated. Saturday marks a year since a fragile ceasefire took effect, while Israeli strikes continue.

A senior Hamas official, Bassem Naim, in a statement Friday called the Nobel for Pillay a message of hope for Palestinians, especially in Gaza, that “humanity still resists the forces of evil targeting international justice.”

The Israeli Foreign Ministry, meanwhile, said in a statement that “if there were an award for lies, hatred, and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner.”

The ministry added on X that the award “isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”

The award was announced less than three weeks before Israel’s election, in which Netanyahu is fighting to stay in power.

Pillay’s win brings renewed attention to Trump’s ongoing feud with the International Criminal Court, where Pillay was a judge from 2003 to 2008. The Trump administration already has sanctioned 13 of the ICC’s staff members, among them key prosecutors and nine judges, including the court’s Japanese President Tomoko Akane.

In his speech to the United Nations General Assembly last month, Trump called the court an “out of control institution” and an “anti-American tribunal with no jurisdiction” over the U.S. He urged member states to quit the court.

There are fears the court as a whole could be sanctioned, a move that could seriously hamper its ability to mete out justice.

Pillay currently serves as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice, the highest court of the United Nations, in the ongoing genocide case against Myanmar.

When countries do not have a national on the court’s permanent, 15-judge panel, they can appoint an expert of their choice. Gambia, which launched the proceedings in 2019, selected Pillay when the country accused Myanmar of committing genocide against the Rohingya minority group.

As a young lawyer in apartheid South Africa, part of Pillay’s work involved establishing key rights for political prisoners being held on Robben Island, which included Mandela, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize.

After apartheid ended, then-South African President Mandela appointed Pillay to be the country’s first non-white woman to serve as a High Court judge.

Last year, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado won the Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle to achieve a democratic transition in the South American nation.

Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal shortly after the United States ousted then-President Nicolás Maduro. But it was largely a symbolic gesture: The Nobel Committee has said the honor itself cannot be transferred.

In Trump’s second term, he has been outspoken about his desire for the Nobel, but has expressed doubts that the committee would ever award him the prize.

“They have a reputation for maybe not giving it to people like me,” Trump told reporters Wednesday.

Four of this year's Nobels were announced earlier this week, in the categories of medicine, physics, chemistry and literature. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will be announced Monday.

The prize money this year is 12 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), whether for an individual, small group of laureates or organization.

Dazio reported from Berlin, and Keaten reported from Geneva. Associated Press journalists Gerald Imray in Cape Town, South Africa; Ali Swenson in New York; Cara Anna in Jerusalem; Molly Quell and Mike Corder in The Hague, Netherlands; and Mark Lewis in Stavanger, Norway, contributed to this report.

AP Nobel Prizes: https://apnews.com/hub/nobel-prizes

South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, speaks at the Nuremberg Forum in Nuremberg, Germany, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026, following the announcement that she had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. (Daniel Karmann/dpa via AP)

South African-born jurist and former U.N. human rights chief Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, speaks at the Nuremberg Forum in Nuremberg, Germany, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026, following the announcement that she had been awarded the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. (Daniel Karmann/dpa via AP)

The Chairman of the Nobel Committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, announces Navanethem Pillay as the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026. (Javad Parsa/NTB Scanpix via AP)

FILE - UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, answers journalist's questions during a press conference at the Geneva Press Club, in Geneva, Switzerland, July 31, 2014. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)

FILE - U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, center, visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, in Jerusalem, Feb. 8, 2011. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner, File)

FILE - Navanethem "Navi" Pillay, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, speaks during a press conference, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Oct. 18, 2012. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP, File)

FILE - United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem Pillay, center, visits Al- Daraj Elementary Co-ed UNRWA school in Gaza City, Feb. 10, 2011. (AP Photo/Adel Hana, File)

The Chairman of the Nobel Committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, announces the Nobel Peace Prize 2026 at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026. (Javad Parsa/NTB Scanpix via AP)

The Chairman of the Nobel Committee, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, announces Navanethem Pillay as the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, Friday, Oct. 9, 2026. (Javad Parsa/NTB Scanpix via AP)

FILE - U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights South African Navanethem Pillay prior to the 23rd session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, May 27, 2013. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)

FILE - U.N. human rights chief Navanethem Pillay prior to the opening of a session of the Human Rights Council at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, June 18, 2012. (Salvatore Di Nolfi/Keystone via AP, File)

FILE - A Nobel diploma and medal are displayed, Dec. 8, 2020, during a ceremony in New York. (Angela Weiss/Pool Photo via AP, File)