LIDAR TECHNOLOGY REVEALS ANCIENT CITY IN SOUTH AFRICA

The same Lidar technology that we used to discover the LOST CITY OF THE MONKEY GOD was recently used to find the buried city of Kweneng in South Africa. Lidar, which stands for light detection and ranging, is a remote sensing method similar to radar detection except instead of radio waves, the system sends out laser pulses that are fired from the air using an airplane or terrestrially with a hand-held device. Unlike the Lost City of the Monkey God, which is shielded by thick, forbidding jungle, Kweneng was hiding in relatively plain sight. The lost South African city sits about 37 miles south of Johannesburg, making it much more accessible. What surprised the team of archaeologists, led by Professor Karim Sadr, was the size and sophistication of the once thriving community. Measuring 10 km in length and 2 km wide Kweneng appears to have contained approximately 750 to 850 households that were occupied by Tswana-speakers who lived there from the 15th century to the early 19th century. For more information on the discovery read this article in The Guardian.

Photograph: Jeffrey Barbee/allianceearth.org