Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:Aerial laser scanning of just 3 percent of a region researchers assign to an ancient civilization revealed evidence of a unexpectedly large precolonial population. A large ancient population dubbed the Aquiry civilization by archaeologists may have lived in the southwestern Amazon jungle roughly 2,000 years ago, rewriting what historians thought they knew about the early inhabitants of the deep rainforest. The earthworks offer “evidence of a monument-building precolonial civilization” on a much grander scale than ever seen before. The Aquiry civilization likely emerged around 600 B.C.E., with villages of roughly 300 inhabitants living in longhouses and cultivating crops like squash, maize, manioc, Brazil nuts, and peach palms. The earthworks were largely abandoned between 850 to 950 C.E., a period that also witnessed the rapid collapse of other precolonial civilizations.