James Stewart
speaker
4,486 appearances
22 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 3d ago
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 — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 3.
Appearances
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.
Within a 300 square kilometer survey area, they found more than 6,000 anthropogenic rectangular earthen platforms and plaza structures,
connected by footpaths and roads, some 13 meters wide, and surrounded by expansive agricultural landscapes and even drainage features.
In other words, what they were looking at was not just a single lost city.
This was a patterned regional network.
They were looking at a hidden metropolis.
The sheer scale of this discovery meant it was likely home to at least 10,000, possibly 30,000 inhabitants in around 500 BCE, with the settlement lasting roughly 1,000 years.
And if you're wondering, by the way, how on earth we know that this was happening that far back, well, science has another trick up its sleeve to answer that question too.
Enter Oxford's radiocarbon accelerator unit.
This team applied radiocarbon dating to organic materials to find out just how old this civilization was.
To quickly explain how this works, every living thing absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, whether that's through photosynthesis or eating stuff that photosynthesizes.
Now, most of that is your regular carbon-12, which has six protons and six neutrons, but a tiny percentage, about one in a trillion particles of carbon, is carbon-14.
which still has six protons but has eight neutrons, so is slightly heavier.
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