Few places on Earth remain as mysterious and enticing to explorers as the Amazon rainforest.
As the biggest and most biodiverse rainforest on Earth, it stretches for hundreds of miles,
and has been here for thousands of years. But a recent archaeological expedition
may have just added another chapter to the story of the world’s most famous jungle.
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question:
did scientists just discover a lost city in the Amazon?
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Several civilizations flourished in Central and South America before the
arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The Maya, whose first cities were built in around 750 BCE, endured in Central America all the way
up until the late seventeenth century. They neighbored New Mexico’s Aztec Empire, which
ruled the Valley of Mexico from 1428 to 1521, before falling to conquistador Hernán Cortés.
Similarly, in South America, the Inca Empire, with its capital in Cusco (in modern day Peru),
was toppled by the Spanish in the 1500s. These civilizations still have living descendants,
however. And they also left behind some incredible ruins, including
major cities. Nevertheless, what researchers have just discovered is completely new.
In 2022, a study was published in the journal “Nature”
detailing a state-of-the-art archaeological survey conducted in the Amazon rainforest.
Up until this study, there had been no evidence of pre-Hispanic, low-density urban sites in the
Amazon - but that’s what this new survey appears to have found. Two new settlements,
thought to have been built by the “Casarabe” culture, which developed in what’s now Bolivia,
across a period of about 1,000 years, up until around 600 years ago. The freshly
discovered site is in an area of the Amazon reportedly so dense with forest that until now,
the ruins had remained totally hidden from view. In contrast, many of the largest known Inca ruins
aren’t in the Amazon forest itself. Machu Picchu, for example, is high up in the Andes Mountains.
But it’s as though these Casarabe settlements have been buried by nature. Nevertheless,
what we know so far about them reveals that they had a complex infrastructure, built around canals
and other artificial waterways. At one time, they too may have been thriving social centers.
But how exactly was this state-of-the-art survey achieved? What technology enabled
researchers to find it, when it has lain undiscovered for so long? In their search,
archaeologists used a technology called “Lidar”, an acronym for “light detection and ranging”.
And, in the contemporary world, it’s a reasonably simple technology to understand.
Essentially, the research team flew a helicopter over the Amazon, and shot lasers down into it. The
lasers then bounced off the surface below and back towards the helicopter, creating a 3D image - and
penetrating far further than what the eye can see. In recent times, Lidar has become a widely used
tool for scanning topography, which scientists need to do for all kinds of reasons to better
understand the physical world and environment we live in. Using a special, water-penetrating setup,
it can even be used to create detailed maps of the seafloor. But here, rather than the waves,
we’re looking through the dense canopy and ancient jungle… and thereby discovering lost worlds!
The two newly discovered settlements are called Cotoca and Landívar. Both were defended by moats
and walls, as well as having the large pyramids we commonly associate with Meso and South
American architecture. Their residents were the wide-ranging Casarabe people, although we still
don’t know much about them. It’s hoped that by further analyzing Cotoca and Landívar, we will
begin to get a better picture of what their lives were like. And, in general, this may be just the
beginning of a new age in exploring the world’s densest jungles for ancient settlements - with
it predicted that there could be many more towns and cities out there, waiting to be found. Lidar
is already being used to map other locations, for example the Congolian rainforests in Africa,
the second-largest tropical forest in the world. And, because lidar is non-intrusive and doesn’t
involve damaging any of the areas it’s used to explore, it’s set to be an increasingly vital
tool in the future… helping us to find ruins in places that are difficult to visit on foot,
without requiring whole expeditions to tramp through the site beforehand.
Similar technology has even been deployed to map the interior of Egypt’s Great Pyramid, too. Using
a combination of methods, including – bizarrely – cosmic ray detectors, scientists were able to find
that the Pyramid of Khufu had a strange, empty, previously unknown chamber inside. Because nobody
wants to take the Pyramid apart and damage it, we have to rely on non-intrusive methods like lasers
(and also remote controlled robots) to explore. The key is always to explore ancient sites without
risking any damage to them, the most important consideration to any archaeologist today.
But finally, and returning to the Amazon, what happened to the Casarabe people for them to leave
their cities? Again, we don’t quite know, but it’s likely that the Casarabe, like the Aztecs,
Maya, and Inca, suffered as a result of Spanish conquest. Like other European colonist nations,
the Spanish decimated the indigenous populations of Central and South America by attacking and
enslaving native people. It’s been found that the Europeans also brought with them diseases,
like smallpox, which tore apart native societies. At its height, a Spanish Empire called “New Spain”
encompassed much of North and Central America… while Spain’s other major territory in the region,
the Viceroyalty of Peru, included nearly all of South America. It took a long time for the Spanish
Empire and its colonies to finally collapse and for South American countries to win back
independence. And even today, the descendants of the indigenous population are still marginalized.
But these now-abandoned sites belonging to the Casarabe aren’t the only lost cities that have
captured the attention of the wider world. To again look at the Spanish conquistadors,
for example, the myth of El Dorado was so widely believed among Europeans that numerous
expeditions were sent into the Amazon to look for it. According to pop culture, El Dorado is
the legendary city made of gold, lost forever to the wild jungle but still waiting to be pillaged.
One such expedition in search of it even included the famed explorer Sir Walter Raleigh. But El
Dorado has never been found, despite its position as the second most famous lost
city on Earth – after Atlantis, of course. The likeliest reason is that El Dorado doesn’t exist,
and in fact, it never did. It’s thought the original myth - referring to a king
who covered himself in gold - came from the Muisca people, who lived in what’s now Colombia.
Over the years, the myth changed and changed to be utterly unrecognizable,
referring to a massive and undiscovered golden city hidden deep in the Amazon basin.
Although El Dorado isn’t real, however, this also isn’t the first time in recent history that truly
forgotten cities have been found in the Amazon. In 2018, it was announced that twenty-four further
sites had been found, with the earliest dating back to the thirteenth century. As is the case
of the Casarabe settlements, these discoveries were only made thanks to modern technology - with
satellite imagery being the crucial factor. Because the rainforest regions that scientists
look at are often so vast, the higher, aerial views that we have today are unparalleled in
their scope - with the twenty-four sites in 2018 eventually spotted on the Brazil-Bolivia border.
Previously, it was believed that nobody would have lived in these parts of the map, right
on the border of the jungle or even within the jungle itself, because of its high temperatures,
rainy weather, and dense foliage… but we now know that actually, that’s not true at all.
Whole societies DID live in the heart of the jungle because they, just like modern humans, were
able to cut down trees and clear them… to make space, to build, and to gain building materials.
This wasn’t industrial deforestation on the scale that’s currently being undertaken in the Amazon,
but it was humankind using and understanding the environment in which it lives.
It turns out, then, that contrary to the beliefs that European colonizers at the time promoted,
South America was home to many complex civilizations and settlements before
anyone else showed up. These settlements featured complex waterways, defense systems,
currencies, and seemingly religion, too, based on the apparent prominence of certain structures
within site plans. We know that they also had the means to cultivate their land to grow food. And
much of the tree systems planted centuries ago to feed Mesoamericans, like fields of cocoa trees and
Brazil nuts, are still there today. Perhaps you’ve even eaten chocolate before that came from a
field originally planted by the Aztecs or Maya. It's clear we still have a lot to learn about the
people who called the Amazon jungle home centuries ago, but new technology is helping to decipher
the rainforest’s many mysteries. And that’s how scientists discovered a lost city in the Amazon.
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