MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP
Scientists have discovered a vast network of densely populated cities dating back 2,500 years, according to a study published Friday, January 12, in the prestigious journal Science. (Brazilian Amazon illustration)
ENVIRONMENT – The largest tropical forest in the world is anything but untouched by civilization. In the heart of the Amazon rainforest, scientists have discovered a vast network of densely populated cities that dates back 2,500 years and was home to a previously unknown agricultural society, according to a study published Friday, January 12, in the prestigious journal Science.
The site, which covers more than 1,000 square kilometers in Ecuador's Upano Valley at the foot of the Andes, includes around twenty towns connected by roads.
• 25 years on the trail of “Upano”
Urban planning on a scale never before seen in such an ancient period in the Amazon. “It is not just a village, but an entire landscape that has been domesticated by humans,” Stéphen Rostain, research director at the CNRS and lead author of the study, tells AFP.
It has been 25 years since this French archaeologist discovered the first traces of this civilization called “Upano” during ground excavations and identified several hundred mounds.
In 2015, a company contracted by the Ecuadorian Monuments Office undertook to fly over the region with a lidar (“Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging”), a small laser remote sensing machine on board an aircraft that allows it to fly between the leaves of the trees dense forest. “By removing the plant cover, you can restore the true shape of the soil in these hundreds of square kilometers, something that was not possible on site,” explains Stéphen Rostain.
The images show more than 6,000 mounds, rectangular earthen platforms that served as foundations for houses to protect them from wet ground. “I didn’t expect anything so spectacular. For an archaeologist it is a true scientific El Dorado,” admits the researcher.
• Rectangular streets “like in New York”
The first platforms were built between 500 BC. BC and 300 to 600 years later and thus cover the period of the Roman Empire. Other pre-Hispanic villages have been discovered in the Amazon, although more recent, between 500 and 1500 AD, and not as huge.
Even more remarkable: the discovered cities are crossed by large dug streets, straight and at right angles, “like in New York,” comments the archaeologist. They connected villages for commercial purposes but also for ceremonial purposes, he said.
Some cities have a large central alley, similar to that of the Teotihuacan archaeological site in Mexico, to bring people from the villages together. Because these were “densely populated”, with “several thousand inhabitants” – a statistical study is underway to obtain a more precise estimate.
• Nomadic “stratified” society
Even 8 to 10 meter high hills bear witness to the construction not of houses, but of communal spaces for rituals or celebrations.
Small fields also show that it was an agricultural society that “used the smallest empty space to bear fruit,” analyzes the scientist who works in the Laboratory of Archeology of the Americas. During the house search he had already uncovered numerous domestic remains: seeds, grinding stones, tools, ceramic vessels for drinking corn beer…
“We are not in the context of a nomadic society, but of a stratified society, probably with an authority and engineers who follow routes,” summarizes Stéphen Rostain.
This discovery, in his opinion, shows “that in the Amazon there were not only archaic indigenous hunter-gatherers, but also complex urban populations,” while “a certain Western arrogance tends to limit the civilizations of forest peoples to savagery.” “It “It’s time to rethink this negative view of the Amazon,” he believes.
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