Archaeologists just took a laser to the Amazon, and it lit up a very different past. A sweeping aerial survey documented in Nature using lidar technology has revealed close to 400 previously unknown earthworks beneath the rainforest canopy near the borders of Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, suggesting that large, organized societies flourished there long before Europeans arrived, the New York Times reports. The geometric structures—circles, squares, and complex shapes connected by roads—date from roughly 600BC to AD850 and range from 7-acre layouts to one spreading across more than 120 acres.
Researchers attribute the network to an ancient pre-Columbian society they call the Aquiry—a word that means "river of caimans," notes Live Science. This was a multicultural people who knew multiple languages, and who may have used the sites as ceremonial and political hubs for festivals, rituals, games, and other gatherings, per the Times. There's no sign the earthworks were defensive or permanently inhabited, but they sprawl across some 1,700 square miles, bolstering the view that the Amazon back then was heavily populated and engineered, not untouched wilderness. One estimate suggests up to 3 million people could have lived in the region at the Aquiry society's peak, though scholars warn that figure is speculative. The finds arrive as logging and soybean farming threaten to erase similar sites, with lidar still not able to fully detect other possible locations due to the thick canopy.
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