How a lost African city was recreated with laser technology
The builders of the stone-walled structures occupied this area from the 15th century ACE until the second half of the 1800s
There are lost cities all over the world. Some, such as 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 that 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, light detection and ranging (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 SA for generations before the first European travelers encountered them in the early years of the 19th century. In the 1820s, all these Tswana city-states collapsed in what became known as the Difaqane civil wars. Some have never been documented and their oral histories have gone unrecorded. Four or five decades ago, several ancient Tswana ruins in and aro...
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