The Amazon valley looked like so many others, with a muddy river snaking through dense forest, except that this one had earthen mounds rising at clear right angles and ditches carving long straight lines through the soil.
In this rainforest, archaeologists say, lay the bones of sprawling ancient cities: earthworks that were once roads, canals, plazas and platforms for homes where thousands of people had lived for centuries, long before Europeans ever tried to chart South America.
The cluster of interconnected cities was only recently mapped in the Upano Valley of eastern Ecuador, a research team reported this month in the journal Science, working off decades of research and laser-mapping technology that has helped to revolutionize archaeology.
With the technology, called lidar, researchers were able to pierce the forest cover and map the ground below it, documenting five major settlements and 10 secondary sites across more than 115 square miles.
Radiocarbon dating found that people lived there from around 500 B.C. to around 300 A.D. and 600 A.D., which would make the settlements some of the oldest found so far in the diverse landscapes of the Amazon.
“It’s a huge contribution to Amazonian archaeology,” said José Iriarte, an archaeologist at the University of Exeter who was not involved in the research.
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