Anthropology

25 May 2022
Correction 26 May 2022

The urban centres are the first to be discovered in the region, challenging archaeological dogma.
Freda Kreier



Researchers uncovered ancient urban centres on forested mounds in the Bolivian Amazon Basin.Credit: Roland Seitre/Nature Picture Library

Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centres, featuring 22-metre-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometres of elevated roadways.

The complexity of these settlements is “mind blowing”, says team member Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute headquartered in Berlin.

“This is the first clear evidence that there were urban societies in this part of the Amazon Basin,” says Jonas Gregorio de Souza, an archaeologist at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The study adds to a growing body of research indicating that the Amazon — long thought to have been pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans — was home to advanced societies well before that. The discovery was published on 25 May in Nature1.

A shift in thinking
Humans have lived in the Amazon Basin — a vast river-drainage system roughly the size of the continental United States — for around 10,000 years . Researchers thought that before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic tribes that had little impact on the world around them. And although early European visitors described a landscape filled with towns and villages, later explorers were unable to find these sites.

More:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-01458-9