He did excellent work considering the constraints of his time, with Denevan being the first investigator to use aerial photos, although he focused on the networks of ridged fields. There had been studies by William Denevan and his student Clark Erickson, which built on work by a Swedish ethnographer Erland Nordenskiöld. ‘This was home to a group called the Casarabe culture, but when we started it was almost a blank site on the archaeological map. ‘We have been working in the Llanos de Mojos area of south-west Amazonia, in Bolivia, for a little over 20 years’, says Heiko Prümers, of the German Institute of Archaeology, and lead author of the report. They offer a jaw-dropping glimpse of a previously shrouded world, which exposes a level of human ingenuity and sophistication in Amazonia that was once simply unimaginable (see ‘Further information’ at the end). The results of this collaboration between the German Institute of Archaeology, University of Bonn, Exeter University, and the Ministry of Planning of the Plurinational State of Bolivia have recently been published. Now a LiDAR survey in Bolivia has used airborne lasers that can virtually strip away the forest canopy to reveal what lies beneath. Even so, until recently few would have doubted that the tropical lowlands were indeed sparsely occupied – especially when compared to the Andes – and that settlement in the rainforest generally amounted to little more than scattered villages. One of the most obvious is that pottery from settlement sites in Amazonia can stretch back thousands of years, indicating stable occupation over impressive timespans. Today, it is easy to appreciate that there are many problems with this narrative. Instead, as life grew harder, so too their artefacts grew simpler, acting as potent illustrations of a losing battle against nature. As the high heat and low availability of food took a terrible toll, the settlers were no longer able to replicate the range of material manufactured in their Andean homelands. Although these people came from sophisticated urban cultures, taming the hostile rainforest environment proved to be beyond their means. An argument was advanced that in late prehistory settlers from the Andes had entered the tropical lowlands. This was home to an extraordinarily rich and varied group of cultures (see CWA 110) – most famously the Inca – and the region still dominates discussion of South American archaeology. Around the mid-20th century, some archaeologists proposed that the answers could be found in the adjacent uplands: the Andes. Such traces of monuments and forgotten fields among the tropical vegetation posed numerous questions. IMAGE: H Prümers/DAI (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut) A series of causeways radiate out from the settlement. The mounds at the heart of the site form its civic and ceremonial core, while the defences encircling the city can also be seen. This screenshot from a 3D animation created using LiDAR survey results shows the 147ha extent of the settlement at Cotoca. Recent work in Bolivia has revealed remarkable traces of lost cities.
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