On January 14, the New York Times published a story on land carvings discovered in the far western reaches of the Brazilian Amazon.

The trenches, too neat not to be man made, were thought to be foxholes for the war against the Bolivians, but archaeological discoveries have dated them much older.

In a time when a struggle between deforestation of the Amazon for farming land continues to grow and encroach on uncontacted tribes, these findings show a past life of farming of swaths of land – similar to what is being done today.

The geoglyphs are still being studied as the exact use is still in question, but their existence is helping shed light on a different Amazon than what is known now.