Over the past 25 years, Stéphen Rostain of the French National Center for Scientific Research has led excavations of Sangay andthat were built by people of the agrarian Kilamope and Upano cultures. Now, the team’s lidar survey of a 115-square-mile area of this region of the Amazon has revealed that these sites were part of a larger network of early urban settlements that date back as far as 2,500 years.
