Africa: Long lost city rediscovered using laser technology

[TheDarkKnight]

Excerpt

There are lost cities all over the world. Some, like the remains of Mayan cities hidden beneath a thick canopy of rainforest in Mesoamerica, are found with the help of laser lights.

Now the same technology which located those Mayan cities has been used to rediscover a southern African city that was occupied from the 15th century until about 200 years ago. This technology, called LiDAR, was used to “redraw” the remains of the city, along the lower western slopes of the Suikerbosrand hills near Johannesburg.


It is one of several large settlements occupied by Tswana-speakers that dotted the northern parts of South Africa for generations before the first European travellers encountered them in the early years of the nineteenth century. In the 1820s all these Tswana city states collapsed in what became known as the Difeqane civil wars. Some had never been documented in writing and their oral histories had gone unrecorded.

https://qz.com/1230830/a-lost-city-i...er-technology/

This technology is incredible. It will be nice once it becomes a bit cheaper to use to start deploying them all around the world to find more such cities.

[athanaric]

Nice

[Roma_Victrix]

This is fantastic news! You gotta love modern technology.

Unlike East Africa with its ancient civilizations in Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, or West Africa, where urban civilization started in the early medieval period with the Ghana Empire, I had always just assumed the southernmost parts of Africa dominated by the Bantu-speakers was basically tribal and completely rural. You know, aside from the huge exception of the medieval city of Great Zimbabwe near Lake Mutirikwe in Masvingo Province, Zimbabwe. It would have been odd, though, for that to have been the only urban settlement within a vast swathe of territory having only small, tribal villages. I wonder if the ruins of these cities are anything like Great Zimbabwe, which just so happened to have its final building phase during the 15th century, when these urban settlements started to appear in the northern parts of South Africa. The ruins of Great Zimbabwe in southeastern Zimbabwe are relatively close to the northern borders of South Africa. That being said, Great Zimbabwe was built by the Shona people, and these newly-discovered settlements in South Africa were built by the Tswana people, as the article states. Both of them are Bantu-speaking peoples, of course, but they are not exactly the same.

I wonder if any of TWC's niche Africa experts know if there is any link between the Shona and Tswana people during the 15th century, if one inspired the other to congregate and form urban settlements. My little hypothesis could be entirely wrong and the Tswana could have developed this entirely in isolation, but that's usually not the case.

[sumskilz]

The 15th Century would be about the time the Tswana people arrived from the north. Their language is still spoken in Botswana and parts of Zimbabwe. In fact, Tswana people make up 79% of the population of Botswana, hence the name.

[Mithradates]

Nice! One step closer to finding El Dorado!

[Ludicus]

It is one of several large settlements occupied by Tswana-speakers that dotted the northern parts of South Africa for generations before the first European travellers encountered them in the early years of the nineteenth century

From the link- SETTLEMENTS, LANDSCAPES AND IDENTITIES AMONG THE TSWANA OF THE WESTERN TRANSVAAL AND EASTERN KALAHARI BEFORE 1820,

To date, however, attention has been given largely to mega-sites, whereas this paper suggests that some Tswana groups moved periodically and built smaller and more sustainable settlements.

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Nice! One step closer to finding El Dorado!

Bah, the true African Eldorado was rediscovered by us in the Gold Coast.
(Portuguese named the coasts in Africa according to what they found in them)

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Designed to close the gold trade to European rivals and to bully African rulers with access to gold, circumventing the trans-Saharan routes of gold supply, and maintaining a monopoly on this trade for one hundred and fifty years.