Giant ancient city found in the Amazon in Ecuador

The lush Amazon rainforest in Ecuador has been hiding a secret, an “incredible” lost network of cities.

An enormous ancient city has been discovered in the upper Amazon rainforest.

Complete with platforms, plazas, streets, farms and canals, the network of settlements was detailed in an article published by lead researcher Stephen Rostain and others in Science.

The finding settles the debate about whether the ancient Amazon was habitable and builds on evidence including pyramids and earthworks that have been uncovered over the past 20 years.

Earth platforms were discovered in a site called Nijiamanch. Picture: Stéphen Rostain

Hidden for years under dense foliage, the interconnected agrarian cities were discovered in the Upano Valley, Ecuador after the researchers studied data from a 300 sqkm light detection and ranging (Lidar) survey.

The “dense system of pre-Hispanic urban centres” have been linked to the ancient Upano people who lived there about 2500 years ago (500 BCE), a date informed by artefacts found by the researchers.

The Lidar image reveals ancient settlements in the Amazon rainforest. Picture: Stéphen Rostain

The Upano people, who may have numbered 30,000, mysteriously vanished about 300-600CE.

About 200 years later people connected to the Huapula culture move into the region.

When Europeans arrived, the forest had already mostly hidden the once-thriving settlements.

The researchers identified “extensive agricultural drainages and terraces as well as wide straight roads running over great distances”.

“The most notable landscape feature is the complex road system extending over tens of kilometres, connecting the different urban centres, thus creating a regional-scale network,” the team said.

Many of the roads were strikingly straight, with workers digging about 3m into the ground and buttressing the trails with piles of soil.

A Lidar image of the Upano Valley. Picture: Stéphen Rostain

The valley was inhabited by the Upano people, followed later by people influenced by the Huapula culture. The Incan empire arrived in Ecuador in the 15th century. Pictured is an artefact of the sun god Inti. Picture: iStock

Mr Rostain, who first noticed earthen mounds in the region about 20 years ago, described the discovery as “incredible”.
“It was a lost valley of cities,” he said.

It’s thought the landscape was dominated by paddocks, irrigated by canals in what Rostain called “garden urbanism”, as reported by Scientific American.

The settlements are notable because of their size and age.

“The settlements are much bigger than others in the Amazon,” Mr Rostain of the French National Center for Scientific Research told New Scientist.

“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,” he said, according to Yahoo! News report.

The settlements are about 1000 older than any others discovered in the Amazon and likely benefited from the advantageous location between the Andes and Amazonia and were boosted by fertile soil from the stratovolcano Sangay.

Co-author Antoine Dorison told the BBC: “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.”