Ancient Amazon City Discovery

​​Mysterious mounds in the Amazon rainforest were once the site of ancient urban settlements featuring pyramids as tall as eight-story buildings, per newly published peer-reviewed research that used lidar remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air.

• “This is the first clear evidence that there were urban societies in this part of the Amazon Basin,” Jonas Gregorio de Souza, an archaeologist at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain, told Nature.

🧠 In the know: The study adds to a growing amount of research indicating the Amazon – long thought to have been pristine and lightly inhabited wilderness before the arrival of Europeans – was home to advanced societies well before that.

In the book America Before, author/journalist Graham Hancock recounts the 16th century travels of Spanish monk Gaspar de Carvajal, who, along with a group of conquistadors, explored the entire Amazon River system from East to West and delivered the earliest recorded eyewitness account of the region.

He described unpopulated forest regions interspersed with heavily populated empires and sprawling cities, some the size of Manhattan, abutting the Amazon River.

Many years later, returning explorers discovered nothing matching the splendor of his account… this damaged Carvajal’s credibility, and thus his writings were dismissed as fiction for hundreds of years. But according to evidence laid out in the book, the Amazonian population could’ve been decimated by one or more catastrophes (disease, famine, etc.), then much of the settlements subsequently swallowed up by the jungle.