What were the main centres of population in South America in 1500 AD?

Question

I'm especially interested in the areas outside the Andes, but a general overview of known sites of urbanisation in the continent in that era would be great.

Edit for clarification: Various articles and books talk about population in aggregate: "x million Incas, y million Aztecs". I'm more curious about what specific cities and urbanised regions we know of - and especially the ones usually neglected in pop culture. Everyone knows about Machu Picchu. Fewer people know about the Muisca Confederation. And the Marajoara culture is all but unknown to the non-scientist. What other well-developed, well-populated regions existed around the turn of the 1500s that few are aware of; and how do they compare to the rest of the continent?

Answer 1

According to the "Pre-Colombian era" article on Wikipedia, there were 4 major cultural groups that developed permenant settlements of significance in South America: the Muisca, Valdivia, Quechua and Aymara. The Valdivian settlement ( in what is now coastal Ecuador) declined centuries before the Spanish arrived. The main Quecha group in 1500 were the Inca, and they were coming to dominate their Aymara neighbors at the time.

Wikipedia's extensive list of historical urban community sizes is also of interest here. It shows that around 1500, the Aztec and Inca empires had the only "urban" population centers anywhere in the Americas. In Mexico there were the Aztec cities of Tenochtitlan (pop. ~80k) and Texcoco (pop. ~60k). In South America there was the Inca's Cusco (pop. ~45k). If you look much further back in time (c. 800 CE), Mayan Copán in Central America was on a similar scale (pop. 63,000). The Muisca, etc. never had settlements on anything near that scale as far as I can tell. The Pre-Colombian peak of Valdivia seems to have been less than 2k people.