Laser scanning, shocked because the pyramid grows in the middle of the 1,500-year-old city in the heart of the Amazon

An urban area with nearly 500 large and small structures, hundreds of kilometers of canals. appeared in the middle of the Amazon forest, both with ancient mysteries and things that should have belonged to modern times.

According to Sci-New, a team of scientists led by Professor Jose Iriate of the University of Exeter (UK) has used LiDAR, a laser detection technique, to detect a great city in the middle of the Amazon forest. area of ​​Llanos de Mojos - present day Bolivia.

One of the clusters of ritual structures looming in the midst of the spooky metropolis of Amazonia

It was a major metropolis of the Casarabe culture, which flourished in the area between AD 500 and 1400.

"We have long suspected that the most complex pre-Columbian societies developed in this part of the Bolivian Amazon, but direct evidence is hidden under the canopy and difficult to access directly." - Sci -News quoted Professor Iriate.

The state-of-the-art remote sensing tool LiDAR has enabled them to identify a series of structures of unprecedented complexity, unlike any other previously discovered, including houses, temples, steps and buildings. especially the 222 m high conical pyramids standing tall in the middle of the city.

According to the paper published in Nature, this type of low-density monument has previously been reported to exist beneath the rainforests of Southeast Asia, Sri Lanka and parts of Central America. However, there is no direct evidence for the Bolivian Amazon.

The new relic area appears in the middle of a desert forest, including public ceremonial architecture including monumental pedestals and steps, topped by U-shaped structures; the mounds, rectangular pedestals; conical pyramids.

Large settlements surround the ceremonial site in a concentric polygon. The most remarkable point is that the entire municipality has a huge water management infrastructure, including large-scale canals and reservoirs, built on a well-drained and extremely favorable soil for agriculture. .

Remote sensing images have revealed a total of 189 large monuments (temples, public buildings), 273 smaller structures, 957 km of canals and dikes. showing that this is not a ceremonial site. deserted, but inhabited year-round by people, spread over an area of ​​4,500 square kilometers.

For a long time, the civilizations of Central and South America have surprised archaeologists with the level of construction and infrastructure that applies many technologies that would not appear many centuries later. In which, prominent are water distribution, filtration and collection systems, helping the people of these ancient cities to have a comfortable life and easily develop agriculture.