It has all the makings of an Indiana Jones film. An entire civilisation, lost and forgotten for 1,500 years in the jungles of Ecuador, has been discovered
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The discovery of an entire network of towns and villages linked by roads and once home to thousands of people has left archaeologists stunned, forcing experts to reconsider how we see ancient Amazonian cultures and habitation patterns.
The civilisation, which is believed to have been established 2.500 years ago and lasted for a thousand years, was based around a series of towns and small settlements linked to one another via a sophisticated road network and was discovered in the Upamo region of eastern Ecuador. Archaeologists believe that tens of thousands of people lived here at one time.
Rumours of lost cities in this part of the Amazon have been circulating for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that any solid proof of the existence of such settlements was made. The latest revelations, which were made by a team led by Stéphan Rostain, a researcher from the CNRS Research Institute in Paris and published in the journal Science earlier this month, have revealed just how extensive and sophisticated the towns and settlements here were.
Using small planes, the research team flew over the area and used a type of laser technology known as LiDAR, which allowed the researchers to see through the tree canopy as ‘if we had cut down all the trees’, said Rostain (interview in French).
Using this technique, the researchers discovered more than 6,000 earthen mounds and rectangular earthen platforms, which are believed to have been houses for the Upano people living here. In addition to the houses, the team discovered plazas, linking roads and canals, and some structures that were likely used for ceremonial purposes. The series of settlements included five major towns and ten secondary sites. Unlike in the Maya culture, where stone was a primary building material, in this civilisation, almost all the buildings were created from hard-packed earth
Prior to this discovery, it was generally assumed that in the past, people only lived in very small settlements, or even nomadically, in much of the Amazon Basin, but this discovery redefines our impressions of ancient human habitation in the Amazon. ‘This is older than any other site we know in the Amazon….It shows we have to change our idea of what is culture and civilisation’ said Rostain.
How and why it was abandoned and then so thoroughly lost remains a mystery. But, the site sits below a volcano and one theory speculates that volcanic eruptions may have led to the city’s doom.
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