Ancient city of beer lovers discovered in the Amazon

Simeon Tegel

SCIENTISTS have discovered the remains of a sprawling network of mysterious ancient cities in the Amazon that may revolutionise our understanding of human civilisation in the world’s largest tropical rainforest.

A little-known culture built arrowstraight roads and canals through thick jungle to connect urban settlements where they ate sweet potatoes and drank beer, excavations have found.

The settlements, and dating from around 500BC, are the largest and oldest of their type, suggesting the Upano people predated the Mayans, Incas and Aztecs. Construction of the earliest buildings appears to have begun around 2,500 years ago, making the site roughly 1,000 years older than the previous earliest known city in the Amazon. Estimates of the number of residents range from tens to hundreds of thousands.

José Iriarte, a professor at the University of Exeter and expert in Amazonian archaeology, who was not involved in the research, said: “This is a major, very significant discovery.”

“It shows a very complex, independent, idiosyncratic civilisation that may have been one of the most sophisticated in the Americas.”

That perspective runs counter to scientists’ traditional view of human development in the Amazon.

It held that peoples there were hunter-gatherers or had small-scale agriculture but never developed into large, hierarchical societies like the Incas’ Andean empire, the Maya’s powerful city states or the Aztecs’ domination of what is now Mexico.

The reason for that interpretation is partly that organic remains, from food to clothing, rot rapidly in the jungle’s humid conditions, leaving little or no trace for modern scientists to uncover.

Meanwhile, there is no stone in the Amazon with which to build, unlike the “monumental” cultures of the Andes and Mesoamerica, who left stunning archaeological remains, from Machu Picchu to the Aztecs’ huge pyramids.

The settlements include five larger cities and 10 smaller ones spread out over 300 square kilometres (116 sq miles) in Ecuador’s Upano Valley, an area of cloud forest where the jungle overlaps with the Andean foothills.

Features include hillside terraces, rectangular agricultural fields with irrigation ditches and an elaborate system of straight roads and canals – all indications of urban planning in a centralised, complex society. The largest settlement is similar in size to the Giza Plateau, home to several of Egypt’s most spectacular pyramids and the Great Sphinx.

Food remains appear to show that the inhabitants cultivated crops including corn, sweet potato and cassava, according to research published in by a team from France’s National Centre for Scientific Research.

Ceramics have also been discovered that show that they drank chicha, a sweet corn beer that is still the preferred tipple among many indigenous communities in Latin America today.

Dr Iriarte says that the scale, dates and unique cultural traits of the Upano Valley settlements suggest that there may have been numerous other complex civilisations across the Amazon Basin, whose remains are also waiting to be discovered.

The settlements are the oldest of their kind, and contradict the established history of the rainforest