Kunguints, Sangay, and What Constitutes a "City"

Suddenly this week the news media all ran stories on the discovery of "cities" in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Which is a little weird, because this work was done over the past decade and described in some detail in a book published in 2021. I suppose the hook was the publication of an article in Science. 

But the discoveries are very interesting and worth discussing. Lidar has allowed archaeologists to shine a light through large areas of dense forest, and fortunately for them, the Indians in this part of the world liked to build mounds that show up clearly in the Lidar maping.

In one part of Ecuador, the Upano Valley, there are a lot of mounds; every red dot in the map above represents one. The Lidar also revealed roads connecting the mound complexes, suggesting that they were occupied at the same time, c. 500 BC to 500 AD.

The two largest concentrations are at sites known as Kunguints (above) and Sangay that news sites are calling "cities." But that is not exactly what the archaeological publications say. They use less definite language, employing terms like "low-density urbanism" and "garden urbanism" to describe these clusters of mounds. That is partly because we really know very little about them; not even a dozen mounds have been fully excavated. But from what we do know, these sites are missing some of the common attributes of "cities." For example, while they have what look like temple complexes, they do not have clear ceremonial and governmental centers like contemporary Maya or Toltec cities. And, more importantly, there isn't much evidence for specialized economic activity. So far as we know now – which, remember, is not very far – these people did exactly the same kinds of work as villagers, including a lot of agriculture.

They are also not really very dense. Kunguints has about 1100 mounds in an area of six square kilometers; if you assume that each mound held ten people, that gets you a desity of around 550 square meters per person, which would absolutely not qualify as "urban" in the way we generally understand it. Population density at sites like Tikal and Teotihuacan was at least ten times that.

So all the "the ancient Amazon was full of cities" stuff you can read on the news sites is a bit overblown. But the finds in the Upano Valley are more evidence that the pre-Colombian Amazon was densely populated with villages and towns. These people built elaborate earthworks, extensive road networks, and systems of canals. They had a highly productive form of agriculture that included corn, manioc, sweet potatoes, acai palms, and peppers and could support dense populations. The vast stretches of unpopulated rain forest that we think of as primordial are nothing of the kind, but have grown up since the native population was devastated by Old World diseases.