Although it is difficult to estimate how many people lived in these connected cities at any given time, archaeologist Antoine Dorison, who worked with Rostain on the Lidar findings and co-authored the paper, said that At its peak, it could have housed as many as 30,000 people. Other estimates suggest the number could have been in the hundreds of thousands. If true, this would make it comparable to the estimated population of London in Roman times.
“This discovery proved that there was an equivalent of Rome in the Amazon,” Rostain said. “The people who lived in these societies were not semi-nomadic peoples lost in the rainforest looking for food. They were not the small tribes of the Amazon that we know today. They were highly specialized people: earthworks, engineers, farmers, fishermen, priests, chiefs or kings. It was a stratified society, a specialized society, so there is certainly something of Rome.
And yet, without two priests, the world would never have heard of this long-lost “Amazonian Rome.”
As Rostain explains, in the 1970s, a local priest named Juan Bottasso came across a strange mound built atop a platform in the Upano Valley. Shortly after, Bottasso was visited by another priest from Quito named Pedro Porras and Bottasso told him, “I want to show you something.” The two men rode to the mound and Porras, apparently curious about what he had seen, organized a cursory search and published his findings in an Ecuadorian newspaper. The site was then forgotten for around fifteen years until Rostain, who had excavated a Mayan site in Guatemala in the 1980s, discovered the priest’s publication and left for Ecuador.
