Sprawling Ancient City Discovered in Amazon Rainforest

A lidar map of the city of Kunguints in the Ecuadorian Amazon reveals ancient streets lined with houses. Antoine Dorison and Stéphen Rostain

Why you can trust us

Founded in 2005 as an Ohio-based environmental newspaper, EcoWatch is a digital platform dedicated to publishing quality, science-based content on environmental issues, causes, and solutions.

An enormous ancient civilization has been discovered in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, hidden for millenia by rainforest vegetation, reported the BBC. The existence of the intricately laid development rewrites previous assumptions about the human history of the Amazon.

The settlement — located beneath a volcano — has a web of canals and roads connecting homes and plazas. The volcano’s rich minerals meant fertile soil for the agricultural community, but may have also been the cause of its demise.

“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,” said professor Stéphen Rostain, leader of the study and director of investigation at France’s National Centre for Scientific Research, as the BBC reported.

“Lidar” laser mapping technology showed the civilization is a lattice of interconnected villages that are a minimum of 2,500 years old, reported Science. That’s more than a thousand years older than other previously uncovered Amazonian societies of similar complexity.

“It changes the way we see Amazonian cultures. Most people picture small groups, probably naked, living in huts and clearing land – this shows ancient people lived in complicated urban societies,” said Antoine Dorison, co-author of the study, according to the BBC.

Archaeologists said people occupied the settlement for as long as a thousand years, but it is hard to estimate the number of residents — anywhere from in the 10 to 100 thousands, scientists say.

“It was a lost valley of cities,” Rostain said, as The Guardian reported. “It’s incredible.”

The archaeologists surveyed an area of 116 square miles from a plane with laser sensors, as well as conducted ground excavations to explore the city’s remnants underneath thick foliage, reported the BBC.

They discovered 6,000 platforms of approximately 66 by 33 feet and six-and-a-half to nearly 10 feet high. The platforms surrounded a plaza in clusters of three to six together. The plaza had another central platform. Scientists think some of the structures — which were carved into hillsides — were used for ceremonies.

Ditches at the entrances of the cities indicated there may have been some outside threats.

Ten smaller settlements and five larger ones were found, Science reported. They were surrounded by agricultural terraces built into the hillside that had been used to plant manioc, sweet potatoes and corn, evidence of which had been found in previous excavations. There were streets between neighborhoods and houses, as well as roads connecting cities.

“We’re talking about urbanism,” said Fernando Mejía, a Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador archaeologist who is one of the co-authors of the research, in Science.

Rostain and his team first started excavations in the Upano Valley almost three decades ago, focusing on the Kilamope and Sangay, two of the larger settlements. Along with central plazas, they found jugs with remnants of chicha — a traditional beer made from maize — and painted pottery. However, Rostain said he “didn’t have a complete overview of the region” at the time.

The authors of the study said the vastness of the civilization challenges that of Classic Mayan “garden cities,” but “is just the tip of the iceberg,” according to Mejía.

Scientists are just beginning to discover the social and cultural complexity and structure of the ancient civilizations.

“We say ‘Amazonia,’ but we should say ‘Amazonias,’” because of the area’s ancient cultural complexity, Rostain observed.

The study, “Two thousand years of garden urbanism in the Upper Amazon,” was published in Science.

“It’s amazing that we can still make these kinds of discoveries on our planet and find new complex cultures in the 21st century,” said Thomas Garrison, a University of Texas at Austin geographer and archaeologist who was not part of the study, as reported by Science.

Subscribe to get exclusive updates in our daily newsletter!