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Ecological legacies of pre-Columbian settlements evident in palm clusters of neotropical mountain forests
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  • Published: 01 April 2026

Ecological legacies of pre-Columbian settlements evident in palm clusters of neotropical mountain forests

  • Sebastian Fajardo1 na1,
  • Sina Mohammadi1 na1,
  • Jonas Gregorio de Souza2,
  • César Ardila3,
  • Alan Tapscott4,
  • Shaddai Heidgen4,
  • Maria Isabel Mayorga Hernández5,
  • Sylvia Mota de Oliveira6,
  • Fernando Montejo3,
  • Marco Moderato4,
  • Vinicius Peripato7,
  • Katy Puche3,
  • Carlos Reina3,
  • Juan Carlos Vargas8,
  • Frank W. Takes1 &
  • …
  • Marco Madella4,9,10 

Scientific Reports , Article number:  (2026) Cite this article

We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply.

Subjects

  • Ecology
  • Environmental social sciences

Abstract

Ancient populations inhabited and transformed neotropical forests, yet the spatial extent of their ecological influence remains underexplored at high resolution. Here we present a deep learning and remote sensing based approach to estimate areas of pre-Columbian forest modification based on modern vegetation. We apply this method to high-resolution satellite imagery from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, as a demonstration of a scalable approach, to evaluate palm tree distributions in relation to archaeological infrastructure. Our findings document a non-random spatial association between archaeological infrastructure and contemporary palm concentrations. Palms were significantly more abundant near archaeological sites with large infrastructure investment. The extent of the largest palm cluster indicates that ancient human-managed areas linked to major infrastructure sites may be up to two orders of magnitude bigger than indicated by current archaeological evidence alone. These patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that past human activity may have influenced local palm abundance and potentially reduced the logistical costs of establishing infrastructure-heavy settlements in less accessible locations. More broadly, our results highlight the utility of palm landscape distributions as an interpretable signal within environmental and multispectral datasets for constraining predictive models of archaeological site locations.

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Data availability

All data supporting the findings of this study are either cited in the references or included in the supplementary materials.

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Funding

This research is part of the “Mapping the Archaeological Pre-Columbian Heritage in South America – MAPHSA” Project funded by Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. This research was also supported by a Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Global Support Grant (Grant No. LDE-127). Pleiades Neo satellite imagery data provided by the European Space Agency.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Sebastian Fajardo and Sina Mohammadi contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), Leiden University, Leiden, 2300 RA, The Netherlands

    Sebastian Fajardo, Sina Mohammadi & Frank W. Takes

  2. Computational Social Sciences and Humanities Laboratory, Barcelona Supercomputing Center - Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS), Barcelona, 08034, Spain

    Jonas Gregorio de Souza

  3. Subdirección de Gestión del Patrimonio, Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Bogotá, 111711, Colombia

    César Ardila, Fernando Montejo, Katy Puche & Carlos Reina

  4. Department of Humanities, CASEs group, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 08023, Spain

    Alan Tapscott, Shaddai Heidgen, Marco Moderato & Marco Madella

  5. Facultad de Artes, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, Colombia, 111321

    Maria Isabel Mayorga Hernández

  6. Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, 2300 RA, The Netherlands

    Sylvia Mota de Oliveira

  7. Division of Earth Observation and Geoinformatics (DIOTG), General Coordination of Earth Sciences (CG-CT), National Institute for Space Research (INPE), São José dos Campos, SP, Brazil

    Vinicius Peripato

  8. Departmento de Antropología, Universidad del Magdalena, Santa Marta, 470004, Colombia

    Juan Carlos Vargas

  9. Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), Barcelona, 08010, Spain

    Marco Madella

  10. School of Geography, Archaeology, and Environmental Studies (GAES), University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2050, South Africa

    Marco Madella

Authors
  1. Sebastian Fajardo
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  2. Sina Mohammadi
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  3. Jonas Gregorio de Souza
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Contributions

Conceptualization: S.F., M.Ma., S.M., J.G.S; Data curation: S.F., M.I.M., F.M., K.P., C.R., J.C.V.; Formal analysis: S.F., S.M.; Funding acquisition: S.F., M.Ma., J.G.S.; Investigation: S.F., S.M.; Methodology: S.F., S.M.; Project administration: S.F., M.Ma., M.M., J.G.S., J.C.V., F.W.T.; Resources: C.A., F.M., F.W.T.; Supervision: S.F., M.Ma., F.W.T.; Visualization: S.F., S.M.; Writing – original draft: S.F., S.M.; Writing – review & editing: All authors.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sebastian Fajardo, Sina Mohammadi or Marco Madella.

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Fajardo, S., Mohammadi, S., Gregorio de Souza, J. et al. Ecological legacies of pre-Columbian settlements evident in palm clusters of neotropical mountain forests. Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-45976-2

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  • Received: 04 September 2025

  • Accepted: 23 March 2026

  • Published: 01 April 2026

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-45976-2

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