James Stewart
speaker
3,838 appearances
20 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3 Sep
James Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 15 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Over vast areas, taking lots of measurements, that means we can generate precise 3D information about Earth's surface.
And in rainforest archaeology that becomes something almost magical.
You can scan the canopy and then remove it digitally and then see the ground like the forest isn't even there and what it revealed was astounding.
Now, I should quickly say LiDAR doesn't show us ancient civilizations on its own, but it does show us shapes, microtopography, geometry, the fingerprints of organized earth moving.
Then the archeologists go in and do their bit.
They excavate, they date stuff, they test the story the terrain is telling.
But as a first step, LiDAR is like looking into your attic with X-ray vision and finding that family heirloom you thought you'd lost without opening a single box.
And in the Amazon, it did not disappoint.
In 2022, using this new airborne technology, archaeologist Heiko Pumas and his colleagues mapped settlements associated with the Casarabe culture, which thrived around AD 500 to 1400 in the Llanos de Mojos region of Bolivia.
But this wasn't just a splattering of small villages.
It was an entire system.
They had found a hierarchy, a landscape engineered for humans.
two main sites stood out from the lidar imaging data enormous in area 147 hectares and 315 hectares respectively the size of nearly 400 soccer fields the sites were embedded in a four-tier settlement system with incredibly advanced architecture including platform mounds and conical pyramid-like structures
Straight causeways ran for kilometers, and canals and reservoirs formed a water management network across the landscape.
What this was was a tropical form of urbanism, a way of living, and a city built from the rainforest itself.
And if one hidden city had finally been uncovered, then the question was unavoidable.
What else was hiding?
The answer lay in Ecuador.
In early 2024, a science study using the same LiDAR techniques revealed a dense settlement network in the Upano Valley of Ecuador along the eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains.
The work, led by archaeologist Stephen Rostain and his colleagues, integrated decades of field research with LiDAR mapping, and with this combined knowledge, they uncovered the unthinkable.
Showing 2001–2020 of 3,838 · page 101 of 192
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