A new study finds that a long-standing scientific debate about whether the region could sustain a large population has been solved.
The Casarabe people lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Amazon basin between A.D. 500 and 1400 and had developed an extensive civilization.
The study researchers used airborne lidar to reveal archaeological structures beneath dense vegetation and discovered several unknown settlements within a network of roads.
In one hour, you can get to another settlement, according to the study lead author.
Archaeologists have found a vast network of Amazon villages.
There is a lowland tropical savanna in the southwest of the Amazon basin. During the rainy season between November and April, a lot of the area is flooded for months at a time.
Spanish missionaries in the 16th century found isolated communities and scientists thought the pre-Hispanic population was the same. Many scientists disagreed about whether the Earthworks were ruins or natural features.
He said that the Casarabe people had instituted a low-density tropical urbanism across a vast area, and that the latest discoveries refute the idea that the region was sparse.
Smaller Casarabe settlements could have been home to thousands of people, and 24 are now known, nine of them being found for the first time.
The settlements were joined by roads and causeways, and had been built in circles around the two major Casarabe sites, but their true extent has only now been revealed by lidar.
There were huge raised platforms on top of enormous pyramids at the ceremonial sites of Cotoca and Land. The platforms and pyramids were the same direction as the Casarabe burials that have been found, according to a study.
The Casarabe built settlements within a huge infrastructure of canals and reservoirs for the management of water.
Along with roads and causeways, these waterways were a major investment in landscape management and labor mobilization, the researchers wrote in the study.
The system may have been used to control the flooding of the region, to allow the farming of maize and other crops in raised areas, and it may have been used to farm fish.
He theorizes that water scarcity may have been a factor in the demise of the Casarabe civilization more than 100 years before the arrival of the Spanish. It is possible that the civilization that relied on the water management system fell apart due to the changing climate, he said.
The Casarabe people were organized into a type of low density, according to findings by an anthropologist at the University of Florida.
The Maya in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica were thought to be unsuitable for ancient civilizations, but now similar structures have been found in other tropical regions.
The use of lidar to reveal the extent of the archaeological record in such regions is a major advancement.
It was originally published on Live Science.
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