Francisco de Orellana and his men were amazed when they sailed down the Amazon with their ship in 1542 in search of a passage to the Atlantic Ocean. Not only was the nature overwhelming, a teeming forest area, but also the numerous fields, villages and towns that the Spaniards saw passing by on both banks. Sometimes hospitable, sometimes hostile. One bank was densely built up with homes and, Orellana’s priest Gaspar de Carvajal noted in his diary, “the people seemed innumerable.”
He heard stories from the locals about even bigger and rich cities. He wrote about roads and silver, he met warrior women, the ‘amazons’ after whom the Spanish later named the river and its basin. In the hinterland, which Orellana did not reach, all kinds of treasures had to wait, perhaps the mythical El Dorado (‘the gilded one’).
Such spectacular travel accounts by Spanish conquistadors from Central and South America, with which they hoped to impress their clients and financiers, have long been viewed with some skepticism by modern readers. Wasn’t it all a bit exaggerated, those stories about large indigenous empires? Propaganda to make their own exploits even more glorious?
But it wasn’t all that exaggerated – on the contrary. The image of pre-Columbian America has been changing significantly since the 1960s – and this has been accelerating in recent years. Not only do previously discovered cities turn out to be much larger than expected, new buildings, roads and canals are also appearing all the time. In Mexico and Guatemala, but also in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil.
We found real urban settlements in the middle of the tropical forest
In August, another far-reaching study was published: the Mayan population of Guatemala, southern Mexico and Belize was probably almost half as large as thought in the Late Classic period of that civilization (600-900 AD), with a peak of 16 million people. Analysis of photographic data showed that the Mayan civilization was not a patchwork of city-states and relatively isolated agricultural communities, but a dense network of interconnected settlements with a shared religious, economic and political culture, often dominated by a large city that competed with other large cities. There is even little ‘jungle’ left where there were no settlements.
What else has the new archeology of the Americas yielded? To start with the south: it even sheds new light on the densely vegetated Amazon. The standard image of that vast area as a wilderness with at most a few widespread Indian villages has been refuted. “We found real urban settlements in the middle of the tropical forest,” renowned French Amazon researcher Stéphen Rostain said in an interview last year. The Upano Valley in Ecuador that he surveyed contains “not hundreds but thousands” of man-made platforms, some ten meters high. Rostain started researching the Amazon forty years ago, when most archaeologists were still focusing on the spectacular Mayan civilization. According to an estimate from 2023, 10,000 to 24,000 archaeological sites remain to be explored in an area of more than six million square kilometers.
A similar archaeological turn is taking place further north. For a long time, the idea that large urban civilizations had little or no existence above the Rio Grande, the border between the US and Mexico, dominated. That image is also shaky. It was known that this area had numerous pre-Columbian settlements, including cities and irrigation canals. But now large areas of indigenous farmland have also appeared in the much more northern state of Michigan, in an area where only nomads would have roamed. The Hopewell “Great Road” in Ohio (100 BCE to 500 CE) indicates that long roads also connected parts of North America. In Florida, numerous have been found along the coast, evidence of intensive habitation.
Yet the most impressive finds are still mainly made in the Mayan area, in Mexico and Guatemala. The cities of Caracol in Belize, Calakmul in the Petén region and Cobá in the state of Quintana Roo all appear to be much larger than previously thought. Cities like Cobá are special because they are the much talked about Mayan Collapse puts in a different light the idea that the Mayan civilization collapsed and disappeared around the year 900. Scripture, language and culture did not perish. What mainly changed was the political reality: great, religious kings (the k’uhul ajaw-ob’) lost their power to new dynasties. Contacts with neighboring peoples such as the Toltecs became more intensive and cultures became mixed.
What is also striking about Cobá is the great Sacbe’, a ‘White Road’ (after the white chalk with which the road was covered) which, at about a hundred kilometers, is the longest discovered so far. The road was lined with buildings and appears to have many branches. There were many more such roads in the Maya area, just as the Aztecs and Incas also had an extensive road network.
A controversial test case is also the large Mayan city of Tikal, excavated in Guatemala in the 1960s. The famous site still surprises archaeologists. In Tikal, inhabited between about 300 B.C. and 900 AD, fortifications and a city district with temples that closely resemble those of Teotihuacan, the huge ruined city in central Mexico, emerged.
Who are the pioneers here? A colorful group of local, European and even Asian researchers have been working on the new archeology of the Americas for years. Linguists are indispensable in this regard, because archaeologists can excavate cities of the Mayans and other indigenous cultures, but what do the signs and images they find mean? What language did the residents speak? The study of indigenous writing systems, Indian languages and cultures, helps to interpret archaeological finds.
I am amazed again and again. Those people were so creative
One of the recent pioneers of pre-Columbian archeology is Edwin Román-Ramírez, who grew up in Guatemala and is now affiliated with the University of Austin. He conducted research on large Mayan cities, with an estimated population of 60,000 to 100,000. “I am amazed again and again,” said Román-Ramirez on the blog Stories from Guatemala about his work in the Motaguo Valley. “Those people were so creative, how they stored food, how they adapted to the environment.”
But the real pioneer is a new technology. Crucial to the revolution in pre-Columbian archeology is the laser technology lidar (which stands for light detection and ranging). The technique, which allows the remains of buildings to be discovered from an airplane or drone straight through a canopy, is now widely used by archaeologists. This makes it possible to make finds even in inaccessible places. “It is one game changer“, says Canadian archaeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor. She works in Calakmul, a city that we now know thanks to lidar was, in its heyday, “almost twice as big as Vancouver today and as big as Brussels or Amsterdam.”
Numerous previously discovered sites have been found to be larger than previously thought. There are also plenty of new finds. In the Bolivian region of Moxos, ancient settlements described as low-density urbanism.
Japanese researcher Takeshi Inomata from the University of Arizona also achieved impressive results with the technique. In 2019, he traced 27 new Mayan sites by analyzing lidar images from behind his desk. His most controversial find, Aguada Fénix, is a huge platform (1,400 by 300 meters) of about 3,000 years old in the Mexican state of Tabasco, near the border with Guatemala. It was probably used for ceremonial purposes.
Much of what has been mapped with lidar has yet to be excavated, but it is certain that archaeological knowledge of Meso- and South America is making a giant leap. Gradually the realization begins to take hold that the Americas harbored civilizations on a global scale that could compete with those of the Near East, China or Europe.
The new finds also highlight an old problem. If the Americas were really as urbanized as archeology suggests, where did those civilizations—and an estimated millions of people—go? Possible, speculative explanations include depletion of natural resources, wars and climate fluctuations. For example, archaeologists suspect that many indigenous cities in the southwestern US were abandoned after long droughts, an idea that also exists about the Classic Mayan cities. Sometimes more eccentric hypotheses arise: for example, the demise of Tikal is said to have been hastened by poisoning with mercury, used to decorate temples and palaces.
One cause is certain: disease. With the Europeans came diseases and epidemics – the first with Columbus’s second voyage in 1493 – that wiped out entire cities and communities in a short time. In the Amazon region, an estimated 85 percent of the population succumbed to disease.
Orellana, who traveled in that area, was unable to experience it, but archeology confirms his travel account. The indigenous civilization that the Spanish gave the legendary name of El Dorado was not a fabrication – it really existed.
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