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An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rain Forest
- dzdt 10y agoThis article badly needs pictures!
- irrational 10y agoAnd an editor, "On the third day, we a stumbled over a cache of objects".
- ajross 10y agoNo kidding. Undisturbed (by historical populations anyway) site discovered by LIDAR alone and... nothing but text? Come on... Surely there is a paper someone can link to with site diagrams? Obviously work at this stage is going to be rough, but something must be available.
- leoc 10y agoI think they may still be skittish about publishing anything that might help looters (or maybe would-be kidnappers) to identify the site.
- waterphone 10y agoNo doubt. Even just fairly little-known archaeological sites in the U.S. are often kept vague and with only obscure descriptions in research papers to keep their location protected from looters and vandals.
- dade_ 10y agoThere is a video, though it only gets to showing some artifacts near the end.
- greeneggs 10y agoPreston's National Geographic article has pictures: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-honduras-lost-city-archaeology-discovery-jaguar-sculptures-photos/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-honduras-l...
- DoodleBuggy 10y agoExcellent, thanks.
- desireco42 10y agoThank you, that article badly needed pictures.
- StClaire 10y agoMore cold water on our image of lost tribes in the rainforest living unchanged since the dawn of time. Nearest we can tell, the uncontacted tribes are refugees from great civilizations who got wiped out by European diseases.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- paxcoder 10y agoThat seems like a stretch to me, maybe expound on what you implied by "more".
- ajross 10y agoWhat? No. This is surely (obviously archaeology has just begun, so nothing firm yet) a Mayan site, as it's smack in the middle of the Mayan homeland. The classic Maya were a big, elaborate urban civilization with recorded writings and easily the best understanding of mathematics among known pre-iron peoples. This has been attested by literally dozens of sites across the past century. We've even translated their written language. The news here isn't the discovery of some new civilation, it's the discovery of a hopefully-undisturbed Mayan site. The others were "abandoned" but still largely plundered, leaving only the big stone monuments undisturbed.
- ivanhoe 10y agoCertainly not all of them, but in certain areas it's quite possible that refugees have been mixing with local population, or even forming new tribes. New research data all indicates that there were some, for that time, huge cities (100+K population) in Amazon basin. It makes sense to presume that when epidemics started at least part of the population managed to escape into surrounding jungle, leaving those cities empty, similar how in Europe many cities have been completely deserted in the time of plague. Obviously, we know so little about this that it's all just a speculation.
- jpatokal 10y agoThis site is in Honduras, not the Amazon.
- Pigo 10y ago>because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been disturbed, if not badly looted. No kidding. I had a Spanish teacher in high school from Peru who'd bring in artifacts he'd found in caves around his home town, his collection included a human skull he claimed was from an Andean civilization. It didn't dawn on me until years later how ludicrous it was that this man had kept this skull he'd found in a cave and then took it across the world to be handled by kids. It still had dirt inside of it! Now I wonder how many laws and customs he'd broken, and whether it was a significant enough find that much was lost by him using it as a trophy.
- joering2 10y agoI wondered how many he broke myself and could not found any laws prohibiting of transportation of ancient bones. I assume this included skulls.
- omgam 10y agoThis is fascinating because it probably dates back to the times of medicinal uses of such. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-o...
- derefr 10y agoThis sort of thing almost justifies the "Indiana Jones" style of archaeology to me: if you know that the location of a "historical site" of "great religious significance" just became public knowledge, then the clock is ticking before a bunch of idiot looters come and break all the walls and vases looking for gold, or take home random skulls to put on their desks. So, presuming you're an archaeologist and know how to quickly-and-efficiently extract and catalogue artifacts without damaging them; and presuming the country that the site belongs to has no governmental body or NGO willing to protect the site; then you may as well book the first plane ticket there, rush in, (carefully) pick up everything of value, box it all up and ship it to a museum—any museum—where it will be put under glass until the significance of the artifacts can be understood. If the locals want their history, their museum can get it back from your museum. Until then, it'll at least be protected from ending up in some foreigner's Spanish class.
- leoc 10y agoUC Davis' CAVE VR environment was used to help find the cities in the LIDAR data: http://doc-ok.org/?p=1204 http://doc-ok.org/?p=1204 .
- carlmcqueen 10y agoTheir experience and description of the deep jungle just makes me think of Predator. How the article just moved on to how disease wiped out so many people wasn't new news to me making me feel like the reality that it was so hard to navigate the city meant they didn't have a lot of content to write about from their nine days in the scariest point of jungle I've ever heard of.
- desireco42 10y agoSo, here is what I don't understand, why did they have to disturb it so much? Western Europeans did a lot of damage and being more careful would be very helpful. Unless they were concerned about looters.
- cowardlydragon 10y agoHOLY SHIT. So the spaniards were slaving people into plantations, where they'd die at a 90% rate from European disease, and then just round up more people for direct exposure? That is worse than a concentration camp.
- Mz 10y agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296058 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296058