2024-01-13 12:34:47
MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP Scientists have discovered a vast network of densely populated cities 2,500 years old, according to a study published Friday January 12 in the prestigious journal “Science”. (Brazilian Amazon illustration)
MICHAEL DANTAS / AFP
Scientists have discovered a vast network of densely populated cities 2,500 years old, according to a study published Friday, January 12 in the prestigious journal “Science”. (Brazilian Amazon illustration)
ENVIRONMENT – The largest tropical forest in the world is far from being untouched by civilization. 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 society lived, according to a study published Friday January 12 in the prestigious journal Science.
The site, which extends over more than 1,000 square kilometers in the Upano valley, in Ecuador, at the foot of the Andes mountain range, includes around twenty towns, connected by roads.
• 25 years in the footsteps of “Upano”
It has been 25 years since this French archaeologist detected the first traces of this civilization called “Hopefully” by excavations on the ground, and identified several 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 in the thick forest. “By eliminating the vegetation 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.
The imagery reveals more than 6,000 mounds, rectangular earthen platforms that served as a foundation for homes to protect them from wet soil. “ I wasn’t expecting something so spectacular. For an archaeologist, it is a real scientific Eldorado”confides the researcher.
• Right-angled streets “like in New York”
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. They linked 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”of “several thousand inhabitants” – a statistical study is underway to have a more detailed estimate.
• Nomadic “stratified” society
Mounds 8 to 10 meters high also testify to the construction not of houses, but of collective spaces for rituals or festivals.
Small fields further 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.
According to him, this discovery demonstrates “that there were not only archaic indigenous hunter-gatherers in the Amazon but also complex urban populations”while a “a certain Western arrogance tends to confine the civilizations of forest peoples to savagery”. “It is time to reconsider this derogatory opinion of the Amazon”he believes.
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