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SUNDAY SCIENCE: REMNANTS OF SPRAWLING ANCIENT CITIES ARE FOUND IN THE
AMAZON
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Alan Yuhas and Jesus Jiménez
January 23, 2024
New York Times
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_ Archaeologists, relying on laser technology and decades of
research, mapped a cluster of ancient cities in eastern Ecuador. Their
findings add to evidence of dense settlements in Amazonia. _
An image generated with laser technology showing streets
crisscrossing an urban area bordered by complexes of rectangular
platforms in the Upano Valley in Ecuador., Antoine Dorison and
Stéphen Rostain
The Amazon valley looked like so many others, with a muddy river
snaking through dense forest, except that this one had earthen mounds
rising at clear right angles and ditches carving long straight lines
through the soil.
In this rainforest, archaeologists say, lay the bones of sprawling
ancient cities: earthworks that were once roads, canals, plazas and
platforms for homes where thousands of people had lived for centuries,
long before Europeans ever tried to chart South America.
The cluster of interconnected cities was only recently mapped in the
Upano Valley of eastern Ecuador, a research team reported this month
in the journal Science
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working off decades of research and laser-mapping technology
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has helped to revolutionize archaeology.
With the technology, called lidar, researchers were able to pierce the
forest cover and map the ground below it, documenting five major
settlements and 10 secondary sites across more than 115 square miles.
Radiocarbon dating found that people lived there from around 500 B.C.
to between A.D. 300 and A.D. 600, which would make the settlements
some of the oldest found so far in the diverse landscapes of the
Amazon.
“It’s a huge contribution to Amazonian archaeology,” said José
Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who was not
involved in the research.
This region, where the Amazon reaches the eastern slope of the Andes,
had long been thought of as an area “with nothing really happening
there,” he said.
Now, he said, “we have this major, idiosyncratic cultural
development.”
Stéphen Rostain, the lead researcher of the study, said he was
impressed by the complexity of the cities and the amount of work
needed to build them.
The “perfectly straight roads” that connected them were one sign
of the cities’ sophistication, he said, adding that they would have
required engineers and workers, farmers to provide food, and some sort
of chairman, chief or king to lead “a specialized and stratified
society.”
A complex of rectangular earthen platforms at the Nijiamanch site
along the cliff edge of the Upano River in Ecuador. Credit...Stéphen
Rostain
The original construction was done by groups from the Kilamope, and
later, Upano cultures, the researchers said, adding that people of the
Huapula culture lived in the area between 800 and 1200.
The team excavated artifacts, including painted pottery and jugs with
the remains of traditional chicha, the corn-based drink that remains a
mainstay of the Andes region today.
Though archaeologists have long known about earthworks in the area,
lidar — which pierces foliage with laser pulses from airplanes and
has helped find hidden Mayan sites and ancient Cambodian cities
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revealed the scope of the settlements.
They eventually mapped more than 6,000 earthen platforms, connected by
roads and laid across a landscape molded to control water and
cultivate crops.
The researchers determined that some of the earthen mounds were
residential platforms, and said in the paper that other, larger
complexes might have served a “civic-ceremonial function.”
Particularly striking, archaeologists said, were the systems of roads
and farming — how ancient people drained away the heavy rains along
the Andes’ eastern slopes to take advantage of fertile volcanic
soil.
“It really shows us that there are many more ways of living in the
Amazon in the past than we used to consider in archaeology,” said
Eduardo Neves, an archaeologist at the University of São Paulo who
was not on the team.
He said that the research added to the growing evidence that the
Amazon was “settled densely by Indigenous people for millennia, in
very large settlements.”
The new paper also builds on research showing the extent to which
ancient people transformed their landscapes, archaeologists said.
“This idea of a kind of pristine, untouched Amazonian landscape was
definitely not the case,” said Jason Nesbitt, an archaeologist at
Tulane University.
That longstanding notion, the archaeologists said, was fueled in part
by how the Indigenous population was decimated by the arrival of
Europeans, and by the raw materials of Amazonia. Ancient people there
did not have huge quantities of stone to work with, like the
monument-builders of Mesoamerica or Peru, and instead used the soil at
hand.
Agricultural modifications in parts of the Amazon, said Simon Martin,
an anthropologist at the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, have “long
pointed to major populations there in the past.”
Amazonia remains “the one vast location where hidden archaeological
wonders could yet lie,” he said.
Dr. Nesbitt added that, although it was difficult to estimate the
population of an ancient settlement, the researchers’ suggestion
that, at one point, as many as 30,000 people may have lived in the
Upano Valley seemed reasonable.
“It’s a very exciting time to do archaeology in the Amazon because
of the use of lidar,” Dr. Neves added. “Places which were already
known are being restudied, and places that were not known are being
mapped for the first time.”
The archaeologists expressed hope that more excavation would be done
in the valley and that the work could help to answer many of the
outstanding questions about the people who lived there, including
their beliefs, their system of governance and what connections to
other societies they may have had.
“We have a lot to learn from the human past,” Dr. Rostain said,
adding the scale and complexity of the cities showed that its
inhabitants were more than “hunter-gatherers lost in the rainforest
looking for food.”
Dr. Neves added that continued research could help protect the Amazon
from the threat of deforestation.
“Some of the destruction is based on the idea that the Amazon has
never been really settled in the past, that there were never many
people there, that it’s kind of up for grabs,” he said. “I think
this kind of work, archaeology in general, and this kind of research,
is really important because it adds to the evidence showing the Amazon
wasn’t an empty place.”
_ALAN YUHAS is a Senior staff editor at The New York Times, formerly
at The Guardian. He is a graduate of Amherst College, Magna cum
laude._
_JESUS JIMÉNEZ is a general assignment reporter for The New York
Times. He previously reported for The Dallas Morning News, where he
covered weather and breaking news. He is a graduate of the University
of Texas at Dallas._
_THE NEW YORK TIMES is a national daily newspaper based in New York
City. A newspaper of record, it is the second-largest newspaper by
print circulation and one of the longest-running newspapers in the
United States. Subscribe to the NEW YORK TIMES.
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WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT SPERM
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A remarkable tale of evolution.
BY DAVID P. BARASH
NAUTILUS
January 3, 2024
* Science
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* Archaeology
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* Ecuador
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* Amazon region
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* mapping
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* Lasers
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* indigenous people
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