Laser Archaeology: Revealing the Amazon's Urban Jungle

Hard-to-reach places, like the Amazon rainforest, can hide traces of past civilizations. But scientists are finding ways to explore these areas from above and discover the effects these ancient peoples had on their environment.

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[MaddieCollins]

My dad is an archeologist, and he hasn’t shut up about Lidar for months. Really cool to see how much of an impact it’s actually making!

[Boo-pvhn]

I love that we’re now getting this information with out digging up natural land.

[regulargoat]

I watched a documentary on lidar’s contributions on studies of human settlements in the amazon a long while ago. It was amazing to see a city reveal itself through small data points scattered about

[UncleManuel]

My first thought was "Oh, it's about the LIDAR project to map Maya cities!" - but then I read "Amazon". 😁
But yeah, this project in the Central America region revealed in the last few years how vast the Maya civilisation really was. And that the landscape did not always was jungle. LIDAR really did transform the way archaeologists can study long gone cultures in an awesome new way. 😎👍

[cbpd]

There is nothing cooler than discovering the ingenuity of ancient civilizations.

[lindenbug]

When I was a little kid I used to wonder if the future of archaeology would be scanning through the ground. While we’re not there yet, this is still really amazing. Imagine all there could be to learn about this civilization and potentially many others we never knew about!

[MajoraZ]

The thing is, there have been news reports about LIDAR and other research finding Amazonian civilizations for decades. "1491" by Charles Mann talked about the degree to which the Amazon had large scale irrigation and agroforestry networks with controlled burns by town building cultures back in 2005, for example, and that book was itself talking about how out of date most general education is with research on the Americas and Precolumbian societies and how little focus they get in schools and even college level history and archeology and anthroipology course. New findings are well and good, but when none of that information is filtering it's way into textbooks and general public awareness and headlines keep presenting additional finds as a brand new thing then it almost doesn't matter. What's the point of research and knowledge if nobody is taught about it?

[pencilpauli]

Given that civilisations grew on major rivers, the question is why a civilization would not have existed in the biggest drainage system in the world

[darbyanderson]

Unfortunately, folks, this is not news. LIDAR has been in use uncovering lost civilizations in the jungles of Central and South America since the early 2000's. They've found SEVERAL in the Amazon, and at least two in Honduras. If you're interested in reading about this, I suggest: 'The Lost City of the Monkey God' by Douglas Preston, 'The Lost City of Z' by David Grann, (Yes, such original titles, I know!) or best yet, '1491' by Charles Mann.

[Isaac_L..]

LiDar is amazing. I am familiar with it for cave research applications. It's perfect for finding deep sinkholes and pits. Tens of thousands of new caves will likely be found in the next 10 years thanks to LiDar. It is so freaking cool.

[hiddenhist]

First learned about this when it was used to uncover cities in southern Africa a few years ago. Amazed to see where this will go.

[tonyhinderman]

Being surprised abt these urban settlements says less about how we think of the Amazon and more about how we think of Civilization, Agriculture and Technological progress as unique features of European culture. I think it would be fairly obvious that if humans were in the region, then they were settling. We keep being "Shocked" to find out ancient non-white european cultures were advanced and intelligent as well.

[robertk]

Don't remember where, but had heard previously that it was likely that the Amazon rainforest was far more developed due to an unexpected lack of diversity in trees. The implication was that much of the forest was overgrown orchards rather than naturally occurring.

[leonmsampaio]

Brazilian journalist Reinaldo Jose Lopes wrote a book titled 1499: o Brasil antes de Cabral a couple of years ago about how modern archeology is revealing evidence all over america of multiple complex communities as large as european counterparts, buildings with its own architecture, roads and trading routes crossing thousands of km of land, river and sea, diversity of languages, cultural exchange, art, jewelry, diplomacy, big monuments, metalworking, wars and defensive buildings, incredible huge territories with poor soil turned suitable for agriculture. Even what looks like "untouched forest" to untrained eyes might have been transformed to better serve native people, as a lot of plant species are more common than what would occur naturally.
At least in Brazil, it took CENTURIES after europeans arrived for their cities to grow populations as big as what is estimated before they arrived.

[gorgonzolastan]

This video doesn't say why it was thought that extensive inhabitation of the Amazon was impossible, which is sort of an important point, and speaks to why extensive cities of the same sort in the Congo would have faced serious challenges.
Tropical rainforest areas of the world are difficult for people to live in because of tropical diseases like malaria, yellow fever, and many more. These diseases are native to the "Old World" though. The Amazon was originally free of these prolific killers. After Europeans made contact with the Americas, but before they moved deep inland, the diseases they brought moved ahead of them, making life in the Amazon very difficult for humans. The Americans these diseases found had no resistance.
So life in the Amazon was perfectly possible for pre-European-contact Americans, but after this the Amazon had a period of relatively greater hazard, before modern medicine made these areas relatively more accessible again.

[ananya.a]

Brilliant! To think there are so many ancient lost civilizations that we could learn about and discover using this technology! Thank you SciShow for making this video! 👍🏻

[edburdo]

I love Hank's face at the end when he's drinking the LMNT stuff. :D

[tttITA]

As a Brazilian, this video makes me highly unconfortable. Around here, it's common knowledge that the Amazon region was greatly populated by people capable of causing lasting enviormental impacts long before the european invasions started, to the point some people consider some regions in the rainforest as traditional agroforests: we have several spots of black earth, and far much more food palm trees, like Açaí and Cupuaçu, than their natural spreading speeds could explain. I mean, of course there were plenty of human settlings in the rainforest... there are such settlements of indigenous people up to this day! Everything in this video sounds heavily eurocentric, and I really don't like it.

[blackoak]

I could gave sworn that charcoal levels in the soil had already shown large scale and long term development of agricultural land in the Amazon basin.
Given that it typically requires a connected society to disseminate similar agricultural practices, I'm not at all surprised that a large society was discovered in the area

[Sauvium]

There’s a Discovery network documentary about this on Disney+ that I watched a few months ago. It’s a game changing piece of technology.