An ancient, massive urban complex has been found in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Scientists have uncovered the Amazon’s earliest and largest example of farm-based citylike settlements high in the foothills of the Ecuadorian Andes.

The thousands of mounds, plazas, terraces, roads and agricultural fields — revealed for the first time in their fullest extent by airborne laser scans — necessitate a rethinking of just how complex ancient civilizations of the Amazon may have been, researchers report in the Jan. 12 Science.

Over the last decade or so, the use of light detection and ranging, or lidar, in archaeology has led to significant discoveries in tropical climates, where ancient settlements often lay obscured beneath dense jungle (SN: 12/4/23). In 2018, researchers released scans

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