Another Amazon secret discovered within the dense jungle due to mapping using laser sensor technology. Many ancient ruins where about 10 thousand people lived.
Archaeologist Stephen Rosten first encountered ancient mounds and road stays within the Upano Valley region of Ecuador greater than 20 years ago.
When he began digging, he found quite a lot of colourful pottery, including jugs that had been tested to contain corn beer. Radiocarbon dating showed that humans settled here about 2,500 years ago and lived for a few thousand years (500 BC to 600 AD).
According to Rosten, he didn’t yet understand that it was actually a really large complex of settlements, or somewhat an enormous city, closely connected by roads.
Due to the impenetrable bushes, intense heat, risk of contracting malaria and other dangerous diseases, and remoteness from civilization, archaeological excavations within the Amazon have all the time been very difficult.
The jungle quickly takes over abandoned settlements, and after several dozen years, nobody passing by will even guess that there was a village or perhaps a city here.
However, modern laser scanning (lidar) technology mounted on drones helps archaeologists discover ancient ruins hidden by vegetation. Recently, the Ecuadorian jungle was mapped using these technologies and lots of rectangular ruins of ancient structures were discovered.
According to Scientific magazineit was an enormous city, or somewhat a network of several large settlements. This is what such ruins appear like from the bottom, they appear like earth embankments and in the event that they are overgrown with trees, you won't guess that it’s a synthetic structure.
Archeology has only recently begun to find that the Amazon was quite densely populated hundreds of years ago and had a quite advanced civilization. Previously, it was believed that only small groups of Indians had lived there since precedent days, whose highest technical achievement were ruined huts and dugouts.
Rosten now calls the Upano Valley “the lost valley of cities.” And based on calculations, not less than 10 thousand people lived here. It is true that archaeologists don’t yet know which civilization built this network of cities, since it is greater than a thousand years older than the previously known Amazonian cultures from pre-Columbian times.
In total, five large settlements and one other ten smaller ones were discovered in an area of 300 square kilometers. Each settlement was densely built with residential and ceremonial buildings, and between them there have been flat, rectangular fields where, based on excavations, corn, cassava and sweet potatoes were grown.
Cities were connected by wide straight roads, and inside cities there have been clearly laid out streets and even districts.
“We can confidently talk about urban planning,” says archaeologist Fernando Mejía from the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, one in every of the authors of the brand new study.
According to him, when it comes to the degree of artificial changes within the landscape, the unknown builders of those cities could even compete with the Mayan “garden cities”. And what has been discovered to this point “is really just the tip of the iceberg” of what else will be present in the Ecuadorian Amazon, says Mejia.
Judging by the layout and dating, all of those cities and roads existed at the identical time and weren’t built one to switch the opposite. Previously, the oldest highly developed society within the Amazon was considered to be the culture inhabiting the Llanos Mojos region in Bolivia, where last yr the ruins of ancient cities with pyramids were discovered using the identical lidar.
However, Ecuador's network of cities turned out to be almost a thousand years older than Bolivian civilization, and their settlements were larger and more developed, as were the roads. The largest roads were 10 meters wide and stretched 10-20 km.
According to José Iriarte, an archaeologist on the University of Exeter, the ruins are so poorly preserved not only since the jungle tried it, but in addition because these cities were built mainly of clay.
For example, the Mayans and Incas were built of stone and their pyramids are still in excellent condition. The unknown Ecuadorian civilization that built these cities existed in the identical era because the Roman Empire and had in regards to the same population as London in the course of the Roman Empire.
And we only discovered about this recently. How many more ancient secrets will we have now to find in the long run? “The Amazon has all the time had an incredible diversity of individuals and settlements. We've just began to learn more about them,” says Stephen Rosten.
Image Source: Pixabay.com
