Lost cities of the Amazon: how science is revealing ancient garden towns hidden in the rainforest
Archaeologists using 3D mapping are uncovering the remains of thousands of green metropolises with composted gardens, fisheries, and forests groomed into orchards
For decades, archaeologists have believed that human occupation of the Amazon basin was far older, vaster and more urbanised than the textbooks suggested. But hard evidence was scant, artefacts were scattered, and there were too few people on the ground to fully assess the magnitude of what lay cached in the dense forest. Then they found a shortcut – lidar.
Lidar (light detection and ranging) scans use pulses of light to create a 3D map of terrain in a fraction of the time it would take to survey from the ground. One of those making the most of the technology is a team of experts led by Vinícius Peripato, an analyst with the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research.
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