250-year-old lost city discovered in Amazon rainforest by advanced technology

As technology advances and becomes more sophisticated, researchers are able to view the world differently, revealing aspects of it that have previously gone unnoticed.

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An aerial view of the Amazon rainforest

An example of that is the recent discovery of a 250-year-old lost city within Brazil's Amazon rainforest, which Brazil's Metropoles publication has detailed in a recent report. According to the news site the team of archaeologist was led by University of Sao Paulo archaeologist Eduardo Neves, and the discover was made possible through the use of advanced sensing technology called Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR.

This form of remote sensing uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure ranges. The light is fired by a laser within the instrument and then it measures the time it takes for the reflected light to return back to the receiver. With these measurements, researchers are able to produce a high-resolution 3D image or map of the targeted area. The researchers took advantage of Brazil's National Space Researchers Institute's LiDAR equipment and flew over a swath of the Amazon rainforest, scanning as they went.

"It was abandoned, the forest took over, and the stone blocks were removed," Neves told the website. "With our maps, we were able to identify the layout of the streets of this city, which was also a fascinating discovery."

What did they discover? Neves and the team discovered the once lost and abandoned Portuguese colonial settlement in the Brazilian state of Rondônia. According to the team this colony once appeared on some maps but was later lost hundreds of years ago, seemingly swallowed by the Amazon jungle.

"We're finding archeological sites everywhere we go in the Amazon region," he continued. "The question is what to do with them."