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takyon writes:

Satellite images have been used to identify 81 newly discovered Pre-Columbian sites, including single hamlets, villages, fortified settlements, and roads, in a remote region of the Amazon rainforest:

The remains of dozens of fortified villages, built before the arrival of Europeans, have been found in a relatively remote region of the Amazon. It seems the southern periphery of the Amazon was home to a million people before 1500 AD – far more than assumed.

"Most of the Amazon is still unexplored archaeologically," says Jonas De Souza of the University of Exeter, UK. "The more we survey, the more we realise that different parts of the basin were more settled than we thought."

The first Europeans to travel to the Amazon reported seeing widespread settlements, including cities and roads. But their reports were later dismissed as fantasies. For centuries, the prevailing view of the Amazon was that it was largely a pristine wilderness before Columbus and other Europeans arrived. Supposedly, only around a million people lived in the entire Amazon basin.

In recent decades, deforestation has helped reveal evidence of extensive ancient settlements, such as large earthworks. It now appears the whole river basin was home to perhaps ten million people before Europeans arrived. Disease and genocide later wiped most of them out, and the rainforest hid the evidence. "We have changed our idea about the Amazon," says De Souza.

Pre-Columbian earth-builders settled along the entire southern rim of the Amazon (open, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03510-7) (DX)

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