The image of an ancient, unspoiled Amazon rainforest might have to be revised after researchers claimed that tracts of it were urbanised well before Colombus sailed the ocean blue (in 1492).

The ‘Amazon rainforest was giant garden city’, says the Telegraph while the BBC hails the discovery of ‘lost towns’ (not strictly accurate as they were first described in 2003). As Scientific American’s headline notes alliteratively: ‘Ancient Amazon Actually Highly Urbanized’.

In this week’s issue of Science researchers from the US and Brazil report their findings on the societies that already existed at the time Europeans arrived in the New World. Many areas previously considered virgin forest have actually been influenced by human activity, says author Mike Heckenberger, of the University of Florida (press release).

Heckenberger previously announced rediscovering these settlements in 2003. They date to around the time Europeans arrived, and likely killed off the residents one way or another, and were then overgrown.

“These are not cities, but this is urbanism, built around towns,” he says.

“The findings are important because they contradict long-held stereotypes about early Western versus early New World settlements that rest on the idea that ‘if you find it in Europe, it’s a city. If you find it somewhere else, it has to be something else’.”

In their latest paper Heckenberger and colleagues report on how they mapped these lost settlements via satellite images and with the assisstance of the local Xinguano tribe who helped them find signs of past farming, pottery and earthworks. They found extensive networks of walled towns and villages all surrounded by earth walls.

Over on Wired though, Anabel Ford, an archaeologist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, isn’t quite convinced: “What is urban? I’d certainly want to see things a little more dense than things are here to call them urban. Still, he’s got lots of settlements. It doesn’t matter how you look at them, he’s got a lot of them.”

If you can read Portuguese or are willing to brave the vagaries of online translators there is an interesting take on this work in the Brazilian G1 news website.

Image: an excavation block in the Amazon / © Science/AAAS