Scientists have discovered a vast network of densely populated cities in the heart of the Amazon rainforest that dates back 2,500 years and was home to a previously unknown agricultural civilization, according to a study.
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The site, which covers more than 1000 square kilometers in the Upano Valley (Ecuador) at the foot of the Andes, includes around twenty cities connected by roads.
Urban planning on a scale never before seen in such an ancient period in the Amazon. “It's not just a village, but a whole landscape that has been domesticated by humans,” Stéphen Rostain, research director at the CNRS (the largest French public scientific research organization) and lead author, tells AFP. the study published this week in the journal Science.
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.
“Like in New York”
The images show more than 6,000 mounds, rectangular earthen platforms that served as bases 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.
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 cities discovered are crossed by large dug streets, straight and at right angles – “like in New York,” comments the archaeologist – that connected the villages. For commercial purposes, but also for ceremonial purposes, according to the expert.
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
Mounds eight to ten meters high 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.
In his opinion, this discovery 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’s time to rethink this derogatory view of the Amazon,” he believes.