The Bolivian Amazon hides an ancient place that remained unnoticed for many years. This region, covered in thick forest, was recently rediscovered by scientists. In a new study, the so-called 'lost city' was mapped out by scientific experts through a laser technique that was shot from an aerial vehicle.
Secrets of Bolivian Amazon
The forgotten settlements are located in a vast forested landscape in the heart of Llanos de Mojos. The place stretches approximately 80 square miles or about 207 square kilometers. This region in Bolivia was already discovered with other ancient features such as canals, roads, elevated forests, and even pyramids.
Most of the structures built on the grounds of the Bolivian Amazon were placed intricately to form a design that possibly catered to their cosmological perspective and culture.
The indigenous people of the Casarabe built the Amazonian heritage. Daily Mail reports that this group existed between 500 and 1400 AD and conquered a whopping 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers) of the Amazon rainforest.
Previous studies have shown how the buildings were built and how the people lived throughout the territories of the Amazon. In the latest study, more evidence of the lost city was uncovered through the help of an advanced approach called Light Detection and Ranging or LIDAR.
Through the laser, the authors of the research could map the enormous forest-covered city that was not seen before in other investigations related to the Amazonian civilization.
Wider Perspective of Western Amazonia Imaged Through LIDAR
Berlin's Commission for Archeology of Non-European Cultures team examined the region to get a glimpse of what the Bolivian Amazon looked like in the past. Led by the commission's German Archaeological Institute specialist Heiko Prumers, the team was able to get information from two large settlements through the LIDAR laser.
Along with Cotoca and Landivar, the scientists found 24 smaller settlement sites and 15 that were not previously discovered.
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The findings from the forest show that the Casarabe-culture settlements were constructed with a pattern representing a tropical low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon that was previously unknown in other research, Vice reports.
The authors said that the data they collected from the place ends the long debate on whether small numbers of people populated western Amazonia before the arrival of the Hispanic colonizers.
Prumers explained that the large settlement sites where the Casarabe structures were built show that the first settlers of the land were well-versed in terms of public and social monuments, creating towering infrastructures that were not able to see before.
Primers continued, the Casarabe settlement system can be considered a singular form of agrarian low-density urbanism that was the first to exist in South America's tropical lowlands.
The authors said that the labor relayed to create these ancient civic-ceremonial architectures, water-management systems, and spatial settlements were significantly better compared to what we have in southern Amazonia's Andean culture records.
The study was published in Nature, titled "Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon."
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