The Amazon Beneath
What's hidden under the canopy
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What's hidden under the canopy
For 500 years, Western science declared the Amazon a pristine wilderness — untouched by civilization. The largest tropical rainforest on Earth, 5.5 million km², home to nothing but scattered hunter-gatherer bands.
That story was wrong.
Denevan (1992) "The Pristine Myth." Annals of the AAG 82(3):369-385
In 1977, a cattle rancher in Acre, Brazil cleared forest and found geometric shapes cut into the earth. Perfect circles and squares. Some over 300 meters across.
By 2020, over 450 had been documented in Acre alone — earthworks dated to 2,500 years ago, connected by straight roads running for kilometers.
0geometric earthworks in Acre state alone
Parssinen et al. (2020) Antiquity 94(378). UNESCO Tentative List #5999.
Then came LiDAR — lasers that strip the canopy and map the ground beneath it. Every survey found something. Every single one.
Bolivia: urban settlements with 22-meter pyramids. Ecuador: 6,000 earthen platforms connected by 10-km roads. Brazil: earthworks across the entire southern rim.
Four independent research teams. Four peer-reviewed datasets. Combined here for the first time:
0documented archaeological sites across the Amazon basin
Walker et al. 2023 (PeerJ) · Peripato et al. 2023 (Science) · Jacobs 2024 · Coomes et al. 2021 (Sci. Data)
In 2023, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research built a predictive model. Based on where sites have been found, where should we look next?
The model predicts:
0undiscovered earthworks remain hidden beneath the canopy
The heatmap you see is site density — brightest where confirmed sites cluster. The prediction says the entire basin is full.
Peripato et al. (2023) "More than 10,000 pre-Columbian earthworks are still hidden throughout Amazonia." Science 382:103-109
We've surveyed 0.08% of the Amazon with archaeological LiDAR.
That's 5,315 km² out of 6.7 million.
0of the Amazon basin remains unsurveyed
In that 0.08%, every survey found new sites. The discovery rate suggests the unsurveyed areas contain thousands more.
Peripato et al. 2023. LiDAR coverage: 5,315 km² / 6,700,000 km² = 0.079%
In January 2026, ESA's BIOMASS satellite began releasing P-band radar data — the first sensor that penetrates dense tropical canopy to the ground.
NISAR launched July 2025. PALSAR-2 scans at 3-meter resolution. The technology to map what's hidden now exists.
Three satellites. Canopy-penetrating radar. Global coverage. Free, public data.
The question is no longer whether the sites exist. It's who will look.
ESA BIOMASS (P-band, 69cm wavelength) · NASA-ISRO NISAR (L+S-band) · JAXA ALOS-2 PALSAR-2 (L-band, 3m)
Every site below is sourced from peer-reviewed research. Click any marker for details. Toggle layers. Search by type.
This is the most complete public map of Amazon archaeology ever assembled.
"Predicting the geographic distribution of ancient Amazonian archaeological sites with machine learning." PeerJ 11:e15137. 2,032 sites + Random Forest model (AUC=0.91). DOI: 10.7717/peerj.15137
"More than 10,000 pre-Columbian earthworks are still hidden throughout Amazonia." Science 382:103-109. 961 earthwork sites + Inhomogeneous Poisson Process prediction model. DOI: 10.1126/science.ade2541
Amazon Geoglyphs & Ancient Monuments Database. 1,370+ geoglyphs with polygon outlines + 83 mound villages. Maintained since 2010. jqjacobs.net/archaeology/geoglyph.html
"Geolocation of unpublished archaeological sites in the Peruvian Amazon." Scientific Data 8:290. 415 sites in Loreto, Peru. DOI: 10.1038/s41597-021-01067-x
Peripato et al. (2023) modeled 10,272–23,648 undiscovered earthworks from 0.08% LiDAR coverage using an Inhomogeneous Poisson Process. Every new LiDAR survey continues to find sites.
This dataset merges all four sources with spatial deduplication (500m threshold). Sites confirmed by multiple independent databases are flagged. All coordinates are from published, peer-reviewed research or maintained citizen-science databases with satellite verification.
Built by Magna Historia.