Amazon had large cities Just when you thought we had been everywhere, seen everything and know it all about our world, along comes a discovery like this. Or, just blame it on our Eurocentric view of the world. After all, there was no civilization before Rome. Right. A new report, published in the journal Science, used archeological and satellite evidence to conclude that the northern Amazon was densely populated with an advanced and complex society, that used the forest withour destroying it. They found nineteen evenly spaced villages, that were linked by parallel, straight roads - implying use of mathematics.