LIDAR and Local Wisdom Reveal the Forgotten Portuguese City Beneath the Amazon’s Canopy
Reported in MSN this week:
“We were able to identify the layout of the streets of this city, which was also a fascinating discovery,” Eduardo Neves, director of the University of São Paulo’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, said in a statement that captures the understated excitement of science encountering serendipity. Under the thick, uncompromising green of the Amazon rainforest, a forgotten 18th-century Portuguese colonial city has risen from centuries of obscurity, its presence attested not by serendipitous excavation, but by the piercing eye of airborne LIDAR and the lived experience of local communities.
The Amazon’s dense canopy has long foiled explorers and archaeologists alike. For years, the idea of huge, structured settlements under its canopies was ridiculed as myth, a remnant of conquistador imagination. Yet as Neves’s team from the Amazônia Revelada project showed, reality often exceeds the imagination and is richer than rumor. Their research, carried out in the Brazilian state of Rondônia, employed LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to virtually remove the canopy of the forest, revealing a city that had disappeared from view and memory after independence in Brazil in the early 19th century.
LIDAR works by emitting bursts of rapid pulses of laser light from aircraft, recording the time taken for each pulse to return from the ground. This creates a thick “point cloud,” which, when processed, results in a high-resolution 3D map of the terrain even when it is hidden under coverings of vegetation. In Rondônia, this technology uncovered a forgotten street grid and geometric terrain features squares, circles, and line traces that could have defined roads, fields, or ceremonial areas under the forest. We still don’t know exactly what they are. They could be areas of cultivation or perhaps places of habitation, but we will have to go back to the field to excavate and better understand their meaning, Neves told Metrópoles.
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