Scientists have discovered the earliest and largest farm-based citylike settlements in the Ecuadorian Andes, located high in the foothills of the Amazon.
Using light detection and ranging (lidar) technology, archaeologists have made significant findings in tropical regions where ancient settlements were often hidden beneath dense jungle (SN: 12/4/23). In 2018, scans of Mayan settlements in Guatemala were released, followed by Olmec ruins in Mexico in 2021 and Casarabe sites in the Bolivian Amazon in 2022. These discoveries revealed metropolitan-like settlements with complex infrastructure (SN: 9/27/18; SN: 1/6/23; SN: 5/25/22).
“It’s like a gold rush, especially in the Americas and the Amazon,” says Christopher Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, who has conducted scans of sites throughout the Americas but was not involved in the new research. “Scientists are proving that there were many more people in these areas and that they significantly altered the landscape. This changes our understanding of how extensively these areas were inhabited.”
Archaeologists have been excavating the Upano Valley, a fertile basin at the base of a massive volcano in the eastern foothills of the Andes, for decades. They have uncovered hundreds of human-made mounds left by pre-Hispanic peoples. However, it was not until 2015 that Upano was systematically imaged, like other Mesoamerican settlements of similar size to the north.
2024-01-11 14:00:00
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