Ecuador’s Amazon civilization was comparable to the Mayans – 01/12/2024 – Science

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, in a region where the forest approaches the first slopes of the Andes, indigenous people built a dense network of ceremonial platforms, roads, canals and fortifications starting 2,500 years ago, new research says.

Although similar structures have already been found in other Amazonian subregions, including the Upper Xingu, in Brazil, the international team responsible for the new study states that none of them rival the discoveries in Ecuador in complexity, extension and antiquity.

According to them, the civilization that built the network of settlements in the Upano River basin would be comparable to its Mayan contemporaries in Mexico and Central America. The difference is that, instead of stone, the inhabitants of the Ecuadorian jungle mainly used packed earth to structure their monumental spaces.

Detailed descriptions of Amazonian monuments have just been published in an article in the specialized magazine Science. The work was coordinated by Stéphen Rostain, from the CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research, in Paris), and also included the participation of German, Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican experts.

The team of archaeologists combined traditional excavations with the use of Lidar, a technology that employs laser pulses launched from above (via planes or drones, for example) to map ground structures that may have been hidden by vegetation.

This, of course, is a common problem in tropical forest regions, where it would be impractical, unethical and even illegal to cut down large areas of forest just to uncover structures of archaeological interest underneath. Lidar was successfully used in areas occupied by the Mayan civilization, for example. In recent years, it has been applied with increasing intensity in the Amazon, with some impactful results.

The inhabitants of the Upano River valley lived mainly in the banks of the watercourse and could see, in the distance, a volcano over 5,000 m high that is still active today.

Plant remains found in archaeological sites prove the consumption of a wide variety of domesticated plants, including beans, cassava, sweet potatoes and corn. The corn grains, in fact, have chewing marks that match the production techniques of a fermented drink, chicha (the fermentation process included human saliva). Local pottery was carefully decorated and was even exported to locations in the Andes.

Lidar revealed that the Upano valley is full of platforms (generally rectangular), made of dirt. In general, they measure around 20 m by 10 m, with a height of up to 3 m.

They are usually present in groups of up to six platforms around a central yard or square, which often also has its own platform. But there are larger structures. The largest set of its kind occupies around 10 hectares (ten football fields) and has a platform 140 meters long and 4.5 m high.

These groups are usually connected by “streets” on a local scale and, in addition, at a regional level, centers of different sizes are connected by roads up to 25 km long and 15 meters wide. Even more interesting, although the terrain in the region is full of hills and depressions, the road layout was made to be as straight as possible.

The group also found a wide network of fields divided by a rectangular “grid” (the divisions are usually 10 m by 40 m) and surrounded by ditches and canals. The team of researchers proposes that the system was created to organize planting and facilitate the drainage of rainwater, which frequently falls in the region.

The connections between the different locations through the road network indicate that the system of monuments and settlements occupied a large part of the region at the same time. Furthermore, archaeologists say, the data suggests that they were built by the people of the region itself, and not by immigrants from the Andes. The dates obtained by the team indicate that the civilization of the Upano River continued until at least the year 600 AD of our calendar. It is still unclear what may have led to its decline.