(Paris) In the heart of the Amazon rainforest, scientists have discovered a vast network of densely populated cities dating back 2,500 years, where a hitherto unknown agrarian civilization lived, according to a study.
The site, which extends over more than 1000 square kilometers in the Upano valley (Ecuador), at the foot of the Andes mountain range, includes around twenty towns, connected by roads.
Urban planning on a scale never seen before in such an ancient period in the Amazon. “It’s not just a village but an entire landscape that has been domesticated by man,” explains Stéphen Rostain, research director at CNRS (the largest French public scientific research organization) and first author, to AFP. of the study published this week in the journal Science.
It has been 25 years since this French archaeologist detected the first traces of this civilization called “Upano” through ground excavations, and identified a few hundred mounds of earth.
In 2015, a company commissioned by the Ecuadorian heritage office undertook to fly over the region with a Lidar (“Laser imaging detection and ranging”), a small laser remote sensing machine on board a plane, which allows you to pass between the leaves of the trees of the thick forest.
“By eliminating the plant cover, you can restore the true shape of the soil over these hundreds of square kilometers, which was not possible on the ground,” explains Stéphen Rostain.
IMAGE ANTOINE DORISON AND STÉPHEN ROSTAIN VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
This LIDAR image shows a main street running through an urban area, creating an axis along which rectangular platform complexes were arranged at the Copueno site in Ecuador’s Upano Valley.
“Like in New York”
The imagery reveals more than 6,000 mounds, rectangular earthen platforms which served as a base for homes, to protect them from wet soil.
“I didn’t expect something so spectacular. For an archaeologist, it is a real scientific Eldorado,” confides the researcher.
The first platforms would have been erected between 500 years BC and 300 and 600 years later, thus covering the time of the Roman Empire.
Other pre-Hispanic villages have been discovered in the Amazon, but more recent, between 500 and 1500 AD. And not as vast.
Even more remarkable: the discovered cities are intersected by large dug streets, straight and at right angles – “like in New York”, comments the archaeologist – which linked the villages together. For commercial purposes, but also ceremonial, 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 have a more detailed estimate.
Nomadic “stratified” society
Mounds 8 to 10 meters high testify to the construction not of houses, but of collective spaces for rituals or festivals.
Small fields also show that it was an agrarian society which “took advantage of the slightest empty space to make it bear fruit”, analyzes the scientist, who works at the Archeology of the Americas laboratory.
By searching homes, he had already unearthed numerous domestic remains: seeds, grinding stones, tools, ceramic jars 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 to trace routes,” summarizes Stéphen Rostain.
This discovery demonstrates according to him “that there were not only archaic indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon but also complex urban populations”, while a “certain Western arrogance tends to confine the civilizations of forest peoples to the savagery.”
“It is time to reconsider this derogatory opinion of the Amazon,” he believes.