Concealed within the condensed foliage of the Amazon, archaeologists have revealed the fragments of an extensive ancient city.
Exploiting LIDAR, a cutting-edge laser mapping technology, an investigation team from National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) steered an in-depth investigation of the hidden landscape.
The comprehensive laser imagery exposed complex networks of roadways, platforms, and plazas that resembled the complexity of those built by the Mayan civilization in Central America.
These hidden relics were uncovered in the upper Amazon and are believed to be from a civilization that existed 2500 years ago.
This original 2500-year-old civilization establishes the earliest and largest low-density agrarian urbanism documented in the Amazon so far, stated the release.
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Over two decades ago, CNRS archaeologist Stéphen Rostain first uncovered the fragments of these cities.
LIDAR technology permitted scientists to glance through the forest canopy, revealing previously unidentified features of hills and other constructions inside the societies of Amazonian Ecuador’s Upano Valley, situated in the eastern foothills of the Andes.
Through extensive research and the use of Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) mapping, the study team distinguished around “6000 anthropogenic rectangular earthen platforms and plaza assemblies.”
These architectural foundations were complicatedly connected by footpaths and roads, which enclosed a broad study area of 300 square kilometers.
The existence of these constructions aided the identification of 15 distinct habitation sites of varied sizes.
Exploring the structures, road networks, and supplementary ruins, the authors believe that this substructure was constructed and occupied between around 500 BCE and 300 to 600 CE.
It was mostly done by societies belonging to the Kilamope and later Upano cultures.
The study team points out that it is hard to estimate the exact population that once existed in this area at any given time. Seemingly, it is likely to range in the tens of thousands.
The eastern part of Ecuador lies under the influence of a volcano, which may have contributed to the civilization’s deterioration.
The conclusions may shape our understanding of the historical narrative regarding the inhabitants of the Amazon.
Such a discovery is another glowing example of the underestimation of Amazonia’s twofold legacy: ecological but also cultural, and therefore Indigenous, the study stated.
We believe that it is vital to carefully revise our presumptions of the Amazonian world and, in doing so, to re-explain contexts and ideas in the required light of a comprehensive and participatory science.
The results were issued in the journal Science.
