Archaeologists in the Amazon have discovered a series of “lost cities” that have flourished for thousands of years, the results of which were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Laser images have revealed an intricate network of roads, districts, and gardens as complex as those built by the Maya civilization.

Traces of the city were first noticed more than 20 years ago by archaeologist Stephane Rostain of France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), but “I didn't have a complete overview of the area,” he told Science. Told.

A new laser mapping technology called LIDAR helped researchers see through forest cover and map new details of mounds and structures in Ecuador's Upano Valley settlement.

The images reveal a geometric pattern of more than 6,000 platforms connected by roads, intertwined with the agricultural landscape and river drainage channels of an urban farming civilization in the eastern foothills of the Andes.

“It was the Valley of the Lost City. It's unbelievable,” Rostain, who is leading the investigation at CNRS, told The Associated Press.

These sites were built and inhabited by the Upano people between about 500 BC and 300-600 AD, but the size of their population is not yet known.

The research team found five large settlements and 10 smaller settlements with housing and ceremonial buildings across 116 square miles of the valley. Its size is comparable to other major ruins. For example, the core area of ​​Quilamope, one of the settlements, is as large as the Giza Plateau in Egypt or the main thoroughfare of Teotihuacan in Mexico.

The landscape of Upano societies may be comparable to Mayan “garden cities,” where homes were surrounded by farmland and most of the food consumed by residents was grown in the city, the authors write in Science. Told.

Co-author Fernando Mejia, an archaeologist at the Pontifical University of Ecuador, said the discovery of Upano was so far only the “tip of the iceberg” of what could be discovered in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

The Amazon is considered the world's most dangerous forest, home to dense towering trees, tangled vines, hostile wildlife, and poisonous insects. Archaeologists believed it was primarily suitable for hunter-gatherers, but inhospitable to complex civilizations.

But over the past two decades, scientists have discovered evidence of human habitation, including mounds, hillforts, and pyramids, in the Amazon River from Bolivia to Brazil.

The newly mapped city in the Upano Valley is 1,000 years older than previous discoveries, including the Bolivian Amazonian society Llanos de Mojos. The discovery shattered what scientists previously believed about civilizations in the Amazon rainforest.

And the details of the cultures of these two places are only just beginning to emerge.

German researcher Carla Jaimes Betancourt, an expert on Llanos de Mojos, told Science that the people of both Upano Valley and Llanos de Mojos were farmers. They built roads, canals, and large public and ceremonial buildings. But “we're just beginning to understand how these cities functioned, their populations, who they traded with, how their societies were governed, etc.” she said.

Rostain emphasized how much remains to be revealed. “We say 'Amazonia,' but we should say 'Amazonia' to capture the diversity of ancient cultures in this region,” he says.

“The Amazon has always had an incredibly diverse range of people and settlements, and there is not just one way of life,” he added. “We're still learning more about them.”