Scientists from France recently discovered an ancient city hidden in the Amazon rainforest. The BBC has reported that a team of scientists used the remote sensing technology to trace the city. Preliminary research suggests that the city existed 3,000 years ago. No city or settlement as ancient as this one has yet been found in the Amazon rainforest.

As per the current map of South America, the ancient city was situated in Ecuador. Scientists noticed something special while conducting research near a volcano in Ecuador’s Upano Valley. They took help of special remote sensing technology, called ‘LiDAR‘ (Light Detection and Ranging), to closely monitor the region. It is a method for determining ranges by targeting an object or a surface with a laser and measuring the time for the reflected light to return to the receiver. Scientists realised the existence of the ancient city after capturing three-dimensional images of the area. They have claimed that the city was connected to other major cities by roads and small canals.

Professor Stéphen Rostain, an archaeologist and the Director of the French national research agency CNRS, has said: “This is older than any other site we know in the Amazon. We have a Eurocentric view of civilisation, but this shows we have to change our idea about what is culture and civilisation.” He has stressed: “The settlements are much bigger than others in the Amazon. They are comparable with Maya sites.” Professor Rostain has informed the press that inhabitants of this ancient city used to live in small groups. Most of them walked around half-naked, and lived in huts. Some of them used to produce vegetables after clearing the forest.

According to an article published in the Science journal on January 11, 2024, the dense system of pre-Hispanic structures has been discovered in the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains. Professor Rostain has said: “I have explored the site many times, but LiDAR gave me another view of the land. On foot, you have trees in the way, and it is difficult to see what is actually hidden there.” He added that images from the LiDAR survey helped them to discover a landscape full of organised human activities, including more than 6,000 rectangular earthen platforms, agricultural terraces and drainage systems.

Professor Rostain has claimed that his team focused mainly on two large settlements, called Sangay and Kilamope. They discovered mounds organised around central plazas, pottery decorated with paint and incised lines, and large jugs holding the remains of chicha, the traditional maize beer. Radiocarbon dates have revealed that the Upano sites were occupied from around 500 BCE to between 300 CE and 600 CE. “I knew that we had a lot of mounds, a lot of structures. But I did not have a complete overview of the region,” added Professor Rostain.

Meanwhile, Co-author Fernando Mejía, an archaeologist at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, has stated that they identified five large settlements and 10 smaller ones across a 300sqkm area in the Upano Valley. According to Mejía, each settlement is densely packed with residential and ceremonial structures. He further said that the cities were interspersed with rectangular agricultural fields and surrounded by hillside terraces where people used to plant crops, including the corn, manioc and sweet potato. He told the media that wide and straight roads connected the cities to one another, as streets ran between houses and neighbourhoods within each settlement. “We are talking about urbanism,” he stressed. For her part, Co-author Georgina Rannard has stated: “The road network is very sophisticated. It extends over a vast distance; everything is connected.”

Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University who has scanned various sites in the Americas, said: “It is a gold rush scenario, especially for the Americas and the Amazon.” He told Science News: “Scientists are demonstrating conclusively that there were a lot more people in these areas, and that they significantly modified the landscape… This is a paradigm shift in our thinking about how extensively people occupied these areas.”

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Published by Koushik Das

Koushik Das (born on May 16, 1976 in Kolkata) is a career journalist. Based in the Indian capital of New Delhi, Koushik writes mainly about foreign policies and current geopolitical issues, and rarely about other topics. His own political ideas are highly influenced by Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Michael Oakeshott and others. English philosopher and political theorist Oakeshott (Dec 11, 1901-Dec 19, 1990) says that “in political activity, men sail a boundless and bottomless sea. There is neither harbour for shelter nor floor for anchorage, neither starting-place, nor appointed destination. But we have to keep afloat”. (Rationalism in Politics, 1962) As a student of Political Science, Koushik loves to share his views on issues, which have great impacts on his thought process (and also on India, South Asia and of course on the global community), with his readers through his website – Boundless Ocean of Politics. By doing so, he tries to keep himself afloat. You will find some of his articles in https://inserbia.info/today/ (https://inserbia.info/today/author/kou_das13_i/), as he has been trying to assess the global geopolitics since 2003. You can also mail him at kousdas@gmail.com View all posts by Koushik Das