James Stewart

When used in tandem, these two techniques reveal incredible things.

Think of LiDAR as finding the where and the radiocarbon dating determining the when.

As amazing as all these discoveries undoubtedly are, they are just zoomed in examples of the mysteries the canopies hid, and they're hints of something far larger.

Really, Bolivia and Ecuador were just the close-ups.

The next step is the wide shot, and here, here's where things get wild.

In 2023, Brazilian geographer and remote sensing specialist Vinicius Peripato did something pretty bonkers.

He applied this same concept, but on a far larger scale, taking an Amazon-wide approach to hidden archeology.

He and his team used LIDAR data originally collected for forest biomass work and scanned 5,315 square kilometers across the basin, which, yes, might sound impressive, but remember, this is the Amazon.

That's roughly 0.08% of the whole thing.

But here's where it gets interesting, because even in that tiny slice of this monstrous green pie, they identified 24 previously undetected earthworks beneath the closed canopy.

Now, if you were to apply those same numbers to the unscanned parts of the rainforest, they estimated there are between 10,272 and 23,648 large-scale earthworks still

still waiting to be discovered, with many likely concentrated in southwestern Amazonia.

What?

Peripato's team also found statistical links between earthwork probability and dozens of domesticated tree species, 53 to be precise.

What this means in real terms is that ancient people shaped the forest.

The species that increased near earthworks were very likely planted

protected and even encouraged.

This part of the Amazon shows huge long-term human influence.

If, if these predictions hold true, it just goes to show that hidden doesn't necessarily mean mythical.

It means not yet measured at the right resolution, in the right dimension and by the right method.