One of the world’s bestknown biomes, the Amazon may have been home to preColumbian urban structures and populations organized into villages more than six centuries ago. This hypothesis was put forward by international researchers who published their findings in the journal Nature last Wednesday (25).
To get the result shown in the picture, the specialists used laser mapping technology in the Bolivian part of the Amazon. The results indicate that Casarabe culture peoples living in precolonial America developed an urban system with sidewalks, canals and water reservoirs.
The team used a helicopter to track a map using LiDAR (light detection and scanning) technology, which is able to laserdetect contours of underground structures that traverse the dense Amazonian vegetation to find the urban network , which probably evolved along the way. from the 500s and 1400s
“This sparsely populated city from preColumbian times was not known anywhere in South America,” says Heiko Prümers, head of the study.
The card reveals that preColumbian peoples built pyramids in the center of settlements incredibly well designed. The research used tracking in six different parts of the Casarabe territory and discovered 11 unpublished locations.
Two of these sites Cotoca and Landívar are pyramidal in shape and much larger than the other structures. Both had driveways connected to smaller units, possibly small camps for specialized activities.
at The connections of these sites varied with areas between 100 and 500 km²Comparable in dimensions to the thousandyearold constructions discovered in the extreme east of Europe, an area where the Trypillian culture that lived more than 6,000 years ago was discovered.
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Roland Fletcher, archaeologist and member of the research team, points out that tropical forests are still poorly understood because of their biological factors such as climatic conditions and relief and believes that places like the Congo forest in central Africa could also have evidence of Lowdensity city formations.
While the results are intriguing, Prümers says there are still many small details that need to be unraveled using other archaeological study techniques. The expert says only excavations guided by laser map evidence will be able to determine the true dimensions of the Casabare culture.