![]() ![]() “The orientation of the buildings that constitute the civic-ceremonial centers of the two large settlement sites is very uniform towards the north-northwest. “The scale and elaboration of civic-ceremonial architecture are key aspects of the large settlement sites,” Prümers and his colleagues said in the paper. Numerous signs of civic and ceremonial life are embedded in more densely populated areas, such as 70-foot-tall conical pyramids and earthen buildings that curiously take the shape of the letter U. The two large settlements, Cotoca and Landívar, were protected by concentric defensive structures that include moats and ramparts. While some of the buried structures at Llanos de Mojos were known, the new LIDAR data revealed a sprawling network of settlements linked by raised causeways that extend for miles across the verdant terrain and in which water was managed by a huge system of canals and reservoirs. LIDAR is a particularly popular tool for archaeologists working at sites that are blanketed in dense vegetation, because they can expose details about past settlements that are difficult to spot or even access on the ground. In this way, the method can generate minute details about topography that are beyond the range of other instruments. LIDAR scanners work by shooting laser pulses at ground targets from aerial vehicles and recording the time it takes for the signal to bounce back. “We propose that the Casarabe-culture settlement system is a singular form of tropical agrarian low-density urbanism-to our knowledge, the first known case for the entire tropical lowlands of South America.” “The architectural layout of large settlement sites of the Casarabe culture indicates that the inhabitants of this region created a new social and public landscape through monumentality,” Prümers and his colleagues said in the study. The results “indicate that the Casarabe-culture settlement pattern represents a type of tropical low-density urbanism that has not previously been described in Amazonia” and that “put to rest arguments that western Amazonia was sparsely populated in pre-Hispanic times,” according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature. Scientists led by Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, used LIDAR to probe the remains of two large settlements called Cotoca and Landívar, along with 24 smaller sites, including 15 that were previously unknown to modern researchers. While field expeditions and Indigenous knowledge have previously shed light on this region’s lost settlements, a remote-sensing technique called Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) has now exposed the enormous extent and tantalizing complexity of this civilization. ![]()
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