ARCHEOLOGISTS have used lasers to uncover a previously undiscovered settlement deep in the Amazon rain forest.
The lasers have revealed a civilization dating back 2,500 years in the Upano Valley site, located along a stretch of the eastern Andes Mountain range, per Live Science.
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This site is the earliest and largest agricultural civilization ever recorded in the area and at its peak may have been home to as many as 30,000 inhabitants.
Scientists have been studying the location for decades, but it wasn’t until they implemented airborne lidar, a type of light detection system, that they uncovered just how expansive this site was, per the journal Science.
The technology works by pulsing thousands of lasers onto the landscape where they reflect to reveal structures hidden by vegetation.
“I have explored the site many times, but lidar gave me another view of the land,” archaeologist and director of research at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) Stéphen Rostain told Live Science.
“On foot, you have trees in the way, and it’s difficult to see what’s actually hidden there,” he continued.
Excavations revealed that the site was roughly 230 square miles and people lived there between around 500 B.C. and 300 to 600 A.D
According to scientists’ studies, the settlement was constructed by the pre-Hispanic Kilamope and Upano cultures.
After a “hiatus” members of the Huapula culture inhabited parts of the settlement as well.
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The findings also show proof of complex street systems going in and out of the area.
“The streets not only crisscrossed throughout the site but also led outside of the site,” Rostain told Live Science.
“These roadways all functioned together and were used to connect the community.”
Archeologists also found remnants of ceremonial buildings erected on large earthen mounds, canal systems, and extensive agricultural fields, per Phys.org.
“Such a discovery is another vivid example of the underestimation of Amazonia’s twofold heritage: environmental but also cultural, and therefore Indigenous,” the study authors wrote in their paper about the findings.
“We believe that it is crucial to thoroughly revise our preconceptions of the Amazonian world and, in doing so, to reinterpret contexts and concepts in the necessary light of an inclusive and participatory science.”
