Lasers Reveal a Maya Civilization So Dense It Blew Experts Minds
Source: New York Times
By JACEY FORTIN
FEB. 3, 2018
Tikal, home to temples and palaces, is one of the best known Maya sites in northern Guatemala.
Credit Justin Lane for The New York Times
They were hidden there, all this time, under the cover of tree canopies in the jungles of northern Guatemala: tens of thousands of structures built by the Maya over a millennium ago.
Not far from the sites tourists already know, like the towering temples of the ancient city of Tikal, laser technology has uncovered about 60,000 homes, palaces, tombs and even highways in the humid lowlands.
The findings suggested an ancient society of such density and interconnectedness that even the most experienced archaeologists were surprised.
“Everywhere that we looked, there was more settlement than we expected,” said Thomas Garrison, a National Geographic explorer and an archaeologist at Ithaca College. “We knew there was going to be more, but the scale of it really blew our minds.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/world/americas/mayan-city-discovery-laser.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Form our 242 year old country. 
What a wonderful ancient marvel.
Really enjoy your posts!
... and they're finding this crazy stuff.
But it's really sad that they're killing rain forests because it's all necessary for Earth's survival. Rain forests produce oxygen from CO2 and provide shelter for thousands of species of plants and animals.
In person they'd look like a hill or a mound or a pile of dead trees with plants growing on them. The LIDAR found them because it can see through the overgrowth.
Here's what one mound looks like:
I suspect the whole reason the project was started was because we already knew there were more unknown sites out there, people stumbled upon them in the past, all it takes is one archeologist to realize what is is. What's an easy way to just find lots of rock structures in a sprawling canopy that requires hours of bush wacking to get through? LIDAR. Now that they know where they are they can go to each of the sites and make paths for other people. Before you had to go "hey, I know of a mound at X location" and maybe show an unimpressive picture. Now they can take the LIDAR data and pitch to get the whole area revitalized.
in South America. It was so good to learn breakthroughs have started there, as well.
What a shame the very same vital, life-giving land which is under attack by greedy exploitive land grabbers who intend to take the trees, then use the land for cattle raising, etc. holds all the physical remnants of large, well-developed ancient civilizations.
Short views of discoveries:
Ancient Civilization in Brazil?
22 Jan 2010
By analysing satellite imagery and aerial photographs, archaeologists have detected patterns of avenues, ditches and enclosures that have lain concealed for centuries under a dense tangle of trees. These structures, up to 200 in number and collectively known as geoglyphs, give the lie to the theory that there were no complex societies in the Amazon Basin until the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century. They haven't been precisely dated, but could be up to 2,000 years old. Spanning a distance of 155 miles, the earthworks are the remains of roads, bridges and squares that formed the basis for a lost civilization - the vestiges of a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society.
The geoglyphs represent enourmous structures, with diameters ranging from 100 to 300 meters, connected by straight orthogonal roads. They are strategically located on plateaux tops above the river valleys. Their builders took advantage of the natural topography in order to construct spaces that were full of symbolic meaning. They were probably villages and ceremonial centres, indicating a society of a complex nature that allowed organization, planning, and large labor force. This suggests a substantial population was living in an area long believed to be too harsh to sustain permanent settlements.
However, this should not come as a great surprise; thermoluminescence and EPR dating of a calcite veneer which covers a rock painting at the Toca da Bastiana shelter in the Serra da Capivara National Park in the Piaui region of Brazil provides dates from 35 to 43 ka ago, implying that the painting is at least 36,000 years old.
The existence of rock art, and therefore a complex and sophisticated society, at such an early date fits perfectly with totally different and independent data obtained from the famous Pedra Furada
rock shelter in the same region.
Bradshaw Foundation
http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/news/archaeology.php?id=Ancient-Civilization-in-Brazil-
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Evidence of Ancient Amazon Civilization Uncovered
by David Knowles
January 8, 2010
As Brazilian rain forest has been cleared away to make way for animal grazing,
the architectural footprint of a network of ancient villages has been revealed.
"The combination of land cleared of its rain forest for grazing and satellite survey have revealed a sophisticated pre-Columbian monument-building society in the upper Amazon basin on the east side of the Andes. This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads," the researchers wrote in the journal.
David Grann, author of the book "The Lost City of Z," points out that the existence of the ruins overturns the previously held belief that this portion of the Amazon basin had always been a pristine wilderness, even though legends of a lost Amazonian city still lingered by the time the Spanish arrived on the continent.
"Although the early conquistadores had heard from the Indians about a fabulously rich Amazonian civilization, which they named El Dorado, the searches for it invariably ended in disaster," Grann wrote on The New Yorker's Web site. (below report)
"Thousands were wiped out by disease and starvation. And after a toll of death and suffering worthy of Joseph Conrad, most scholars concluded that El Dorado was no more than an illusion."
More:
http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/arqueologia/amazoncivuncovered.htm
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FINNISH ARCHAEOLOGIST DIGS UP ANCIENT CIVILIZATION IN BRAZIL
24 SEP , 2013
“Archaeologist Martti Pärssinen has made sensational finds of an ancient civilisation in the Amazonian area. The summer’s digs in Brazil have unearthed unique artefacts, including entirely new forms of ceramics.
The clearing of the Amazon rainforest has revealed mysterious patterns in the earth. The large-scale patterns are best visible from the air, where Finnish archaeologist Martti Pärssinen takes pictures of them.
The geometrical patterns have been made with earth mounds and moats. Many of them are huge, with sides measuring up to a few hundred metres. Over 300 such structures have been discovered in the Brazilian state of Acre alone.
The construction feat involved can be compared to that achieved by those that built the pyramids in Egypt.
More:
http://www.genesisquest.org/finnish-archaeologist-digs-ancient-civilization-brazil/
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Search NBCNews.com
Nature's cover-up: An ancient Amazonian civilization
Evidence for a past civilization is subtle — so subtle that it can easily be mistaken for nature
Below:
Explainer
Image: Xinguano village
Michael Heckenberger and Jim Railey via Science/AAAS
An artist's conception shows a Xinguano village of the
Brazilian Amazon as it might have appeared before
1492. Archaeologists have found traces of wide,
curbed roads and managed parkland.
By Zahra Hirji
updated 9/9/2010 12:44:14 PM ET Print Font:
Spanish adventurer Gaspar de Carvajal wrote of "cities that gleamed white" and "very fruitful land," on his wanderings along the Eucadorian Napo River in 1541. But today there is little evidence of such a civilization. Instead this corner of the Amazon, like the rest of the massive tropical forest, is seemingly inhospitable: full of dense, obstructive vegetation and buzzing with poisonous creepy crawlers.
Is this a case of a Spaniard painting pretty pictures to pocket more money for future conquests, or an example of a perfectly executed cover-up directed by Mother Nature herself?
The Washington Post recently reported on the work of Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo of the University of Florida, who is part of a growing number of anthropologists who believe an ancient, advanced society once occupied Amazonia.
Though Oyuela-Caycedo and others do not necessarily take Carvajal at his word, they do believe that subtle soil disturbances in the Amazon landscape prove the past existence of a complex society — potentially even the one Carvajal claims he encountered.
More:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/39079905/ns/technology_and_science-science#.WndhDainHIU
ETC.
