Graham Hancock on archaeology: what the evidence says · JRE #1284
“we can say that a city like London, which had a population of roughly 50,000 in the 16th century, there were cities of that size all over the Amazon, huge numbers of them, and a possible total population of the Amazon that exceeded 20 million people”
What the evidence says
Archaeological and lidar research has established that parts of the pre-Columbian Amazon, including the Casarabe culture area of the Bolivian Amazon, supported organized, interconnected settlements far more complex than once assumed, overturning older views of the basin as sparsely populated wilderness. Researchers characterize this as a distinctive form of "low-density urbanism" -- dispersed networks of towns, causeways, and earthworks rather than compact cities comparable to 16th-century London; the largest confirmed Casarabe sites documented by lidar cover roughly 147 to 315 hectares, a settlement pattern structurally different from a walled early-modern European city. Estimates of the Amazon basin's total pre-Columbian population remain genuinely contested among specialists, with published figures ranging from roughly 2 million up to the tens of millions depending on methodology; a figure "exceeding 20 million" sits at or above the high end of that range rather than reflecting settled scholarly consensus. The claim that "cities of that size" comparable to London existed "all over the Amazon" in "huge numbers" overstates what the archaeological and lidar evidence directly supports, which documents extensive, networked, low-density settlement rather than numerous compact cities of London's scale. The underlying revision of Amazon population history toward greater pre-Columbian complexity is well-supported in outline, but the specific framing of city size and the confident 20-million-plus total go beyond what current evidence establishes.