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+--- Thread: Article The Amazon's 'lost city' has been widely misunderstood. This is its true story (/thread-20555.html)
The Amazon's 'lost city' has been widely misunderstood. This is its true story - C C - Jun 1, 2026
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260529-the-real-story-of-the-amazons-lost-city
EXCERPTS: Once inside the system of formations, its man-made nature becomes clearer – amongst the tall grass there is a deep, long path and eight mounds organised in a geometrical pattern. One hill has a path sliced through it, and I see its interior of stratified mud with different shades of bright brown.
Yépez is an expert in ancient Amazonia from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Ecuador (Puce), and this is what is known as the Huapula Site. It is one of the densest networks of man-made mounds yet found inside Ecuador's so-called "lost city" of the Amazon – a sprawling system of dozens of such clusters.
Local archaeologists have known of some of these formations for 50 years, but the sheer scale of this 3,000-year-old urban landscape has only recently surfaced thanks to new mapping technology.
The discovery has helped upend the long-held idea that ancient Amazon-dwellers were only small groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers: instead reinforcing the theory that they were likely organised into sophisticated civilisations capable of creating complex urban networks.
However, as we learn more about these connected mounds, it's becoming clear they were not "cities" in the classical sense we understand them today, but rather a kind of urbanism unique to the Amazon jungle: low-density and multicentric, harnessing the strengths and weaknesses of the surrounding forest.
What is still unclear, though, is how and why this intricate world was made – and what will happen to it now that it's been discovered. [...] The site contains a massive, sprawling network of almost 7,500 man-made structures, according to one of these analyses, published in 2023 by experts commissioned by the INPC. These include over 5,000 earthen platforms, around 1,500 hills and hundreds of rounded mounds, plaza-like areas, terraces and paths, roads, ditches and drains.
[...] "Lots of people were needed to create those platforms, there were many people living there, many people working, and many people transforming the jungle," says Alejandra Sánchez Polo, an archaeologist at the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain and the other co-author of the INPC analyses.
[...] The wide-spanning news coverage saw Upano Valley's earthen formations garner the nickname of the "lost cities of the Amazon" and the journal Science featured Rostain's paper on its front cover with the words "lost city". But the designation left some experts uneasy. In a 2025 paper, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, an anthropologist at University of Calgary in Canada, examined the way the media has overhyped several Lidar findings, including those in Upano Valley.
The word "lost", she notes, implies something is "no longer known" or "ruined or destroyed". But locals and local archaeologists knew and studied the mounds well before the new Lidar work, albeit not fully grasping the scale of their networks. Comparisons with Rome, reported in media including the BBC, she writes, impart a grandiosity on the findings, noting its size "hardly compares with Rome".
[...] "They're kind of like the alter ego of European city-based urbanism, in the sense they're multicentric, low density, and so… a form of urbanism without cities," says Michael Heckenberger, an anthropologist at the University of Florida...
[...] t's still unclear when these mounds were first created. In interviews, the French team, the INPC-commissioned team and the Ecuadorian team led by Yépez all tentatively suggest around 3,000 to 2,500 years ago. ... It's also not known whether the settlements had a large permanent residential population or was more about large numbers of people coming and going for ceremonial activities, for instance, says Yépez.
[...] "There are still a lot of things missing in the picture,” says Delgado. One glaring problem is that there are barely any traces of the humans who actually lived there. Excavations in the area are yet to find any burial grounds, or any skeletons at all. "One of the most important questions for me is, where are the people?" says Delgado... (MORE - missing details)