Casarabe towns of the Bolivian Amazon

Between about 500 and 1400 CE, people of the Casarabe culture in the Llanos de Mojos, a seasonally flooded savanna in the Bolivian Amazon, built a network of settlements over some 4,500 square kilometers. In 2022 a team led by Heiko Pruemers published lidar surveys, which use laser pulses from aircraft to see the ground through forest, revealing two large centers, including Cotoca and Landivar, the larger covering about 315 hectares, with platform mounds, U-shaped structures and conical pyramids up to about 22 meters high, surrounded by ramparts and linked to smaller sites by raised causeways running for kilometers, alongside canals and reservoirs.¹²

For much of the 20th century many scholars believed Amazonian soils were too poor to support large, complex societies. Casarabe, along with earthworks in Brazil's Acre and the Upano valley of Ecuador, overturns that view. Its people farmed maize, managed water through the wet and dry seasons and reshaped the landscape for centuries. Researchers describe it as low-density urbanism, a dispersed form of city quite unlike the dense cities of the Andes or Mesoamerica. The settlements were abandoned before Europeans arrived.¹²