-
Ah yes, as predicted by yours truly. :)
https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/220312/
However, going back further, I think it was @Sumo who posted the first article about it in this thread. I hadn't heard about it before then.
Having thought about it for quite a while now, I imagine it was most likely smallpox introduced by the Spanish, particularly the de Orellana expedition, that decimated these populations.
Of course, they didn't just 'vanish', they just dispersed from larger cities that they probably thought were cursed, to where they thought they'd be safer elsewhere, and, needless to say, as in the case of the 'vanished' Maya and Aztecs, their descendants are very much alive today. I still wonder whether some of the 'uncontacted' Amazonian tribes may be such descendants who have avoided contact because the old stories about terrible plagues brought on their ancestors. I really hope their oral traditions will somehow be written down eventually.
At any rate, I'm sure they'll find many more huge places, and probably also whichever city was really the model for 'El Dorado'. The theories around at the moment are interesting, but there's nothing like more excavation.
As with the most recent Maya discoveries, it also again goes to show how quickly huge human cities can be obscured so much that modern archaeology has such trouble finding them (when they'll generally be well-known to people living locally), although obviously LiDAR is and continues to be a total game-changer in the case of cities hidden in jungles.
The main worry with all this remote sensing is that it can give looters very good starting-points, something I'm sure already happens all the time. It's not just LiDAR but also the methods used for the work in Egypt years ago. You generally have to delay publication a bit until the excavation has been done, but with immense sites that's obviously not possible. I hope they've managed to secure the site somewhat. It would be a shame if all the context were lost because of looting.
The most interesting question to me is always whether they'll find written materials, and if so, that they can be deciphered. Here's hoping. There's a lot of history still to be written properly.
You are reading a single comment by @Oliver Schick and its replies.
Click here to read the full conversation.
Oliver Schick
A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation.
The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon.
The houses and plazas in the Upano area in eastern Ecuador were connected by an astounding network of roads and canals.
The area lies in the shadow of a volcano that created rich local soils but also may have led to the destruction of the society.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67940671