Scientists have uncovered the Amazon’s earliest and largest example of farm-based citylike settlements high in the foothills of the Ecuadorian Andes.
The thousands of mounds, plazas, terraces, roads and agricultural fields — revealed for the first time in their fullest extent by airborne laser scans — necessitate a rethinking of just how complex ancient civilizations of the Amazon may have been, researchers report in the Jan. 12 Science.
Over the last decade or so, the use of light detection and ranging, or lidar, in archaeology has led to significant discoveries in tropical climates, where ancient settlements often lay obscured beneath dense jungle (SN: 12/4/23). In 2018, researchers released scans of remnants of Mayan settlements in Guatemala, followed by Olmec ruins in Mexico in 2021 and Casarabe sites in the Bolivian Amazon in 2022, all which have been revealed to be metropolitan-like settlements filled with complex infrastructure (SN: 9/27/18; SN: 1/6/23; SN: 5/25/22).
“It’s a gold rush scenario, especially for the Americas and the Amazon,” says Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who has scanned sites throughout the Americas but was not involved in the new research. “Scientists are demonstrating conclusively that there were a lot more people in these areas, and that they significantly modified the landscape,” he says. “This is a paradigm shift in our thinking about how extensively people occupied these areas.”
For decades, archaeologists have visited the Upano Valley, a fertile basin at the foot of a massive volcano in the eastern foothills of the Andes, to excavate hundreds of human-made mounds left by pre-Hispanic peoples. But, until 2015, Upano had not yet been systematically imaged like other, similarly sized Mesoamerican settlements to the north.
Then, the Ecuadorian government scanned a 600-square-kilometer swathe of the valley. Based on his own expeditions in…
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