Experts work at an archaeological site.

That there was a network of cities and agricultural system connected by wide roads and stretching for about 12 miles came to light, opening up a new perspective on Amazon forest in South America. The discovery was reported in the American journal Science by archaeological researchers working in France.

The Amazon has been seen as a pristine forest with no history of human settlements comparable to the pre-Columban civilisations of the Mayas and Incas in Mexico. The discovery in the Ecuadorean Amazon opens a new chapter in ancient history. The Ecuadorean settlements appear to have lasted from around 500 or 300 Before the Common Era (BCE) to around 600 of the Common Era (CE), spanning a millennium, and corresponding to the period of ancient Rome from its founding to its decline and fall. The houses and other constructions were made of mud in contrast to the stone structures of the Mayans and Incas. The reason for the use of mud as a building material is because there was no availability of rock in the region. The constructed structures comprised ceremonial buildings, irrigation canals, apart from roads and houses. The size of the archaeological remains suggests that it could have supported a population of around 10,000 to 15,000. It is estimated that London in Roman Britain would have sustained a similar population size.

The mounds were noticed by the French archaeologist Stephen Rostain 20 years ago but he was uncertain of what it could lead to. It is the use of laser technology to survey the terrain that revealed what could be an ancient Amazonian civilisation predating the others in the Western hemisphere, for the first time. Rostain heads the National Scientific Reseach Centre in Paris, and he is the lead author of the research published in the science journal.

This discovery should open a new debate about civilisations that existed beyond Asia and Europe, and which seem to have flourished on their own, without contact with other parts of the known world. And it now being conjectured that this was the Upona people, who created this setup at the foothills of the Andes mountains. The assumption so far has been that until the arrival of Columbus in what was considered the New World, only scores of tribes grew maize and barley, and they hunted in north America, while in south America tribes lived in the midst of thick vegetation and tropical climate. That there was a sophisticated urban settlement in the heart of south America is a startling discovery, and it changes the whole narrative about the ancient world, which now stretches into the Americas.

One of the exciting aspects of the study of the past in modern times is the persistent search for new things, and not resting content with what we know. Sometimes the research seems to be idle curiosity leading nowhere, but then suddenly there opens a new door to the past. This makes constant research a rewarding exercise.

It seems inevitable that south America with its rivers, forests and mountains should have remained uninhabited, or that there was no evolved culture and civilisation. It could be the case that the people in the Americas with whom the European explorers and exploiters came into touch were living at the end stage of an earlier thriving civilisation. The European explorers assumed that the people whom they met have always lived in the state that they appeared to be in, and that they had no long past of their own which had passed through stages of rise and fall. It has been the European view of the rest of the world that has prevailed in the 500 years. But with these new discoveries, it will become apparent people in different parts of the world have followed their own cycles of historical development.

This would lead to changes in our state of historical knowledge. The discovery of the urban civilisation at the Andean foothills in Ecuador now covered by the Amazon forest should enable us to view the ancient world with a new perspective. And it is time that archaeologists from Asia and Africa should join their European counterparts in the study of this new civilisation in south America.