Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Lidar reveals pre-Hispanic low-density urbanism in the Bolivian Amazon

nature.com

167 pointsbcaulfield63 comments

Its a good thing that books like 1491 are increasingly validated with archeology.

The previous prevailing wisdom held that outside of the Aztecs and the Inca sophisticated urban settlement didn't prevail in the Amazon due to the "Green Desert" hypothesis and primitive tools.

This research confirms early Spanish chronicles, previously derided as fanciful, that vast urban settlements existed along rivers for many miles and would stretch continuously for hours as they travelled down river.

1491 was reporting on archeology, cutting edge archeology for when it was written in 2005. It's nice to see the field progressing but it wasn't like Mann was guessing! I'm just eager for a new book updated with all the findings since that book was written.

I'd buy that book for sure.

1491 was eye opening for me in the same way that few books are. Others that come to mind:

Guns Germs and Steel

Godel Escher Bach

Guns Germs and Steel is widely considered discredited by anthropologists. It introduces a lot of concepts that were previously unfamiliar to the layman (not unlike Godel, Escher, Bach), but it has a lot of weaknesses and is much too strong in its conclusions.

It's worth reading the quick overview in Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel#Critici...

I'm not saying it shouldn't be eye-opening, but just that you should take it with a large grain of salt. It's not as definitive as is commonly thought.

Some of those critiques introduce additional assumptions that Diamond's arguments don't rely on:

"has almost no role for human agency—the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate."

Assumes a conquest due to technological and other disparities implies a lack of human agency on both sides. Why wouldn't the level of human agency everywhere remain roughly constant pre and post colonization regardless of what happened? The only way I can make sense of this is if the writer assumes 'human agency' is some magical force that can overcome every other factor.

"Diamond's account makes all the factors of European domination a product of a distant and accidental history"

Assumes all 'factors' arose as a result of events in the distant past. Gunpowder, which was spread from China via the silk road, clearly and immediately was put to use fairly soon after the Spanish got hold of it, within a few generations.

etc.

Thanks, I wasn't aware of the critiques!

I misunderstood what you wrote due to the 2 conditionals you had "previous... didn't". I re-read what you wrote and you're correctly saying that there were sophisticated urban dense settlements in the Amazon.

From the paper: "Here we present lidar data of sites belonging to the Casarabe culture (around ad 500 to ad 1400)10,11,12,13 in the Llanos de Mojos savannah–forest mosaic, southwest Amazonia, revealing the presence of two remarkably large sites (147 ha and 315 ha) in a dense four-tiered settlement system. "

You must be referring to Fransisco de Orellana, re early Spanish chronicles. More on that on this JRE podcast clip https://youtu.be/Cn1MugPalaA?t=118

Where are the pictures?

EDIT: They're only in the PDF: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04780-4.pdf

From the VUX-1 LIDAR product specs, it seems they flew over the area no with an airplane at > 2,460 ft. to collect the data.

http://www.riegl.com/products/unmanned-scanning/riegl-vux-1u...

> They're only in the PDF

I can see all the figures on the webpage version just fine. Just click the interlink or scroll in the figure sidebar.

I'm a Native-American from the Andean region. And I had some idea that there were settlements, from a few articles I read some time ago. For example, the Inca and other Pre-Hispanic cultures were known to have traded parrot feathers. There had to be networks in the jungle. This is by far a more comprehensive report.

Hello fellow South American :D you might enjoy the 1941 book by Charles Mann. A lot there will already be known to you, but it is still a very good book.

I can second that. You may also enjoy The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity[1] which goes into a ton of detail about the sate archeology regarding pre-Colombian peoples in the Americas. I learned that Teotihuacan had abandoned the pyramid temples and pulled down many of it's palaces and rebuilt the city with apartment blocks hundreds of years before being abandoned.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Everything-New-History-Humanity/...

I recommend the above too and add David Reich’s “Who we are and how we got here” which speaks to aspects of human biology and migration through genetics.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35749414-who-we-are-and-...

After reading this review[1], I'm now really interested to read his book.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2376793572?book_show_a...

I just finish it, and it was very good.

This seems like a huge opportunity to gather up a bunch of natives that are familiar with navigating the land, professional archeologists, a camera crew, and just let the story unfold itself.

Why isn't the entertainment industry more interested in creating exploratory content like this?

Imagine watching a series about a bunch of people sitting in muddy pits doing paperwork for 3 months, or counting charcoal/pollen on a microscope in a lab. That's 'real archaeology'.

There's a very limited amount of information known about what's uncovered while people are onsite and film crews would be prohibited from filming most of the spectacular things that might be found for ethical reasons. Moreover, it usually takes 1-2 years after excavations are completed to organize everything to a degree of public presentability.

All of that is a really bad fit for typical production schedules and TV drama, so what popular media does is go to people who have opinions about sites that are already long excavated and find the ones that give them the most 'interesting' soundbites and perspectives post-editing. It's entertainment rather than education.

You’ve clearly never watched “American Diggers” /s

That’s what’s cool about imaging technologies, you can get interesting and amazing information the day you pop up some lidar drones. You can overlay this with satellite imaging and ground penetrating radar. Combine this with local archaeologists and other experts and it does really end up being compelling, even if largely speculative.

I have quite a bit of remote sensing experience from the field and I've since left archaeology to work in autonomous vehicles where I get to play with sensors my former annual salary couldn't have purchased.

I strongly believe remote sensing technology is important, but it's usually just a first step in guiding and supplementing traditional fieldwork rather than replacing it. Having pretty landscape models to ogle at is nice, but typically not all that useful academically without time-consuming additional analysis to map things like artifact scatters or statistical models back onto it.

> [...] crews would be prohibited from filming most of the spectacular things that might be found for ethical reasons.

Could you explain this?

Archaeologists and anthropologists are required to treat remains, cultural artifacts and funeral goods in particular with 'dignity and respect' by professional ethical norms. That's a legal requirement that's taken very seriously in many American countries to boot.

What that means in practical terms is that we typically avoid taking pictures or doing procedures that aren't strictly necessary for research and engage in a complicated process called consultation to find related descendents to get their permission for various things/do repatriation of artifacts and remains.

Unfortunately the finds we can't show are also the ones media and laypeople are the most interested in.

I am very happy that community holds such a high standard. What surprises me sometimes is that the quite some deepsea diving communities in research does not uphold such ethical standards. Whenever I see footage of diving boats with 15K lumen lights shining on deep sea animals I cringe a bit.

Not knowing anything about this, do deep sea animals have the ability to perceive light? If not, the light would be harmless unless I'm missing something.

Some definitely do, otherwise anglerfish wouldn't have the dangling lightbulb as a lure.

>Not knowing anything about this

Correct

>do deep sea animals have the ability to perceive light

They do

Have I got the show for you...

https://g.co/kgs/KhN9J9

A Google search link for time team.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Team

Oh, I absolutely loved this when I was a kid. We'd all sit down together as a family every Sunday to watch it.

I've always had a love for archeaology and history, and I think I have that show to thank for it :)

For anyone curious, the whole series is available on YouTube :) It's really not the most exciting show though.

Yep. Reminds me of when I was working for a remote sensing startup and we had conversations about being featured in an episode of a popular BBC magazine show. I could understand why they were interested: "space detectives" fighting environmental crime with satellites sounds very cool on a TV listing. It's just their concept of a TV proposal had us zooming in on live action they staged for us like a spy film, and the reality was a guy in a home office tweaking scripts to batch process low resolution static images from previous months followed by enforcement officers possibly taking some action months later (I figured out that beyond the pretty images we could theoretically visit an actual location with historic prosecutions and get just-for-TV drone footage as well as interviews for background context, but we never got close to the relevant stakeholder permissions)

And I say this having also watched Time Team so I know you can make good TV from an archaeological dig with the right experts and permissions and pretty good background knowledge of what was built there when!

Check out ‘Lost Cities with Albert Lin’ for something that is pretty much this. It was on Disney+ last I checked. I believe there is hope for a new season.

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/603999/tech-maps-lost-ci...

Probably only available in the UK, but:

Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon https://www.channel4.com/programmes/jungle-mystery-lost-king...

I am reluctantly not at all a fan of these kinds of publications of unknown historical sites. All it does is expose to thieves where untold archeological sites are to be found.

Aren't these areas densely covered in hostile impassible terrain? Even knowing the location it would take a miracle or a ton of resources to have any hopes of getting there

No harder than getting on a boat and starting the engine.

I believe you have never been to the Amazon. It is not like taking a water cab in Amsterdam or a ferry in nyc.

The sheer complexity of canals[1], [2] tides, [3] seasonality influences a great deal on who will have the guts, time and money to visit the region.

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/eco.1863

[2] https://www.tide-forecast.com/locations/Macapa-Amazon-River-...

Also all the critters/way to get poisoned by something.

For people that live there is like taking a cab in a canal.

They have river shuttles, it is no where close to taking a cab. I've been there.

Not really. What's the worst that can happen to someone taking a cab in a canal?

Something I mentioned to my friends the other day is that I wish someone with the time, energy and resources would just start lidar-ing large swaths of Earth. And the seabed.

Every day we inch closer to some profound realization about humans and where we came from, but no one seems in a rush to figure it out.

Getting large swaths of the seabed is going to be beyond the resources of almost everyone. They spent like $200m hunting for MH370... and didn't find it. And on the scale of the ocean that was not a large swath by any means.

I'm not going to pretend to be an expert but it seems like the hard/expensive part is probably building the underwater drone capable of taking the LIDAR?

I would imagine at some point getting overhead satellite imagery by plane of the entire world seemed impossible - as did street view coverage of the entire US - but not the craziest expense once you have the ability to do it once.

The really hard part is the combination of the very short range of light transmission underwater and the very large size of the oceans. How many centuries are you willing to spend on the project?

The MH370 search used sonar, which works well underwater but has quite short range so it involved driving ships around on the surface dragging sonar arrays backwards and forwards for years.

I think this is one of the systems used during the MH370 search, apparently it can scan 192km² per day.

There are 161,000,000 km² of ocean, so you'd need at least a million days or 3,000 years to scan the whole thing, give or take.

http://www.slhydrospheric.com/prosas60_spec.html

That sounds extremely slow but presumably now that they've built one the cost to build 100 or 1000 would be achievable if someone (or some government) had the interest.

I would think they would need a version that doesn't need the ship nearby to scale - but would still guess this is something that will be accomplished on the order of 30 years from now.

There are 161,000,000 km² of ocean...

Sorry if you aren't the best choice, but I had to ask someone in the thread.

Why? I mean why all the ocean?

If the purpose is to find archeological sites, most will be on the continental platform.

_what if_ you find remains of a truly ancient civilisation on the abyssal plains. Now that would get the films rolling!

Would be curious if those gliders were helpful or not/how much smaller.

There's twice as much sea as land, and from a brief glance LIDAR penetrates to 300m (whereas google informs me the average depth of the ocean is ~3600m) as well as presumably some weird topology which might make for interesting challenges.

Certainly doesn't sound easy, but it'd be interesting to hear from anyone who works in this area.

Instead of SpaceX, couldn’t Elon musk have funded seaX and created teams to design and build autonomous scanning drones at scale?

For the purposes of studying human archaeology, I don't care about the deep sea. I want LIDAR surveys of shallow coastline waters. Global sea levels 20,000 years ago were 125 meters lower than they were today. Our ancestors could have been living on shorelines that are now deep under water. There could be extensive archaeological sites that are undiscovered because they are buried under 60 meters of ocean water.

Ancient human tools have been found by fishing boats in Doggerland, the portion of the North Sea that used to be a land bridge between Europe and England. I bet there's a whole lot more discoveries to made just a few miles offshore.

Yeah, for sure. Doggerland would be top of my list too.

Persian Gulf would be a trove

One day, but I have to confess I like that there's still mysteries below us. Vs everything being known already.

As someone who used to do academic archaeology, there are plenty of people with both the time, energy, and ideas out there. The main thing that's missing is money.

Funding is tight to a degree that I don't think people from the traditional STEM disciplines realize. The average grant size is far lower than the average NSF grant despite much greater fieldwork costs [1]. The financial restrictions mean you're constantly weighing how important it really is to do basic checks like carbon dating, or whether you can afford imagery (vs just using a printout of google maps). I remember being heartbroken at losing a drone because the money spent buying it, and having to camp in fields and eat fish for long periods because I couldn't afford lodging/other food.

[1] https://dougsarchaeology.wordpress.com/2014/03/12/does-the-s...

How reliable are these LIDAR scans? They seem pretty speculative to me and the way they label features doesn't always make sense. Like page 10 of the PDF has a causeway intersecting with a canal and merging. That doesn't seem likely or possible given what I know about canals and roads.

If billionaires have to spend their money on vanity projects, I wish they would spend it on something like this.

I'm surprised more billionaires are interested in going to space but not exploring earth itself

Avi Loeb is planning a project to search the ocean floor near Papua New Guinea for interstellar meteor fragments from CNEOS-2014-01-08.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNEOS_2014-01-08

A better fit is Ground Penetrating Radar or at least do it with LiDAR - there is much more archeology below the surface than above.

The issues of GPR in rocky or variable soils and the difficulty of interpretation end up being very limiting to actual usage in my experience. It's pretty difficult to scale in the same way LIDAR can.

It's also common for there to be surface expressions of sites, as long as your signal filtering and sensors are good enough. Even the 1m data the UK publishes has been amazingly useful.

With the data I've seen from modern high end sensors, whew.

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