A discovery published in the journal Nature revealed that the Aquiry, an ancient civilization of the southwestern Amazon where the state of Acre is now located, may have reached the mark of three million inhabitants and built 30 thousand large compacted earth structures, known as geoglyphs, about 2 thousand years ago. This population would be equivalent to one quarter of the Inca Empire.
The revelation was not an isolated fact. Over the past two decades, different research projects have been revolutionizing population estimates for pre-Columbian Amazonia, discovering that ancient local peoples had a level of sophistication in agriculture and architecture that had not been previously imagined.
The technology responsible for these discoveries is LiDAR, a type of radar that maps the territory and can reveal structures hidden under the dense vegetation of the Amazon rainforest, allowing the identification of formations that would be impossible to detect with the naked eye or by traditional archaeological research methods.
