Nº 44
LIDAR Found Lost Cities Under the Amazon
They flew a laser scanner over the Amazon - and the canopy peeled back to reveal a lost city with 21-meter pyramids.
They told you the Amazon was empty. Pristine wilderness, untouched. So scientists flew a laser scanner over the Bolivian jungle - and the canopy peeled back to reveal a lost city.
The tech is called LIDAR: millions of laser pulses fired from a plane that strip the trees away and map the ground underneath in 3D. Point it at a jungle that looks like nothing but green, and the forest disappears from the picture - leaving the shape of what people built.
What it found: the Casarabe
A whole civilization. The Casarabe built earthen pyramids up to 21 meters tall, stepped platforms and terraces, from around 500 to 1400 AD. Not stone temples - packed earth, raised by hand, basket of soil by basket of soil, into monuments the height of a seven-story building.
And they were connected
These weren't isolated villages. Straight raised causeways ran for kilometers, linking city to city across the flooded savanna - plus canals and reservoirs moving water through a landscape that drowns for half the year. The whole region was plumbed and paved by people who understood their water.
The "empty jungle" was engineered land
Archaeologists call this low-density urbanism - garden cities, spread out among fields and forest islands, the size Europe never guessed were here. And here's the honest correction: the idea of the Amazon as untouched, pristine wilderness is a myth. The lead archaeologist says it plainly - that image was created by Europeans. What the lasers found was a worked, cultivated, lived-in homeland.
The Amazon wasn't wilderness. It was a homeland. Mexican by name. American by history.
| Claim | Confidence | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| Airborne LIDAR over the Llanos de Mojos (Bolivian Amazon) revealed 26 Casarabe-culture settlement sites (11 previously unknown), including two large primary centres, Cotoca (147 ha) and Landívar (315 ha) - a dense, four-tiered settlement network dated ~AD 500–1400. | Solid | Prümers et al. 2022, Nature 606:325–328 · Full text (PMC9177426) |
| Civic-ceremonial architecture included stepped platforms, U-shaped structures, rectangular platform mounds and conical earthen pyramids up to ~21–22 m tall, surrounded by concentric polygonal banks. | Solid | Prümers et al. 2022, Nature · Smithsonian Magazine |
| Sites were linked by straight raised causeways running several kilometres, with massive water-management infrastructure - canals and reservoirs - across the seasonally flooded savanna; the pattern is a form of tropical low-density urbanism not previously described in Amazonia. | Solid | Prümers et al. 2022, Nature · Sci.News summary |
| The pre-Columbian Llanos de Mojos was extensively engineered - raised fields, drainage canals, causeways and thousands of habitation mounds across a ~140,000 km² savanna - overturning the assumption of an "empty / pristine" Amazon. | Myth-corrected | Lombardo et al., Quaternary Research 2013 · Smithsonian (Prümers: "a myth… created by Europeans") |
