Tea at Trianon: Lost Cities in the Amazon

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, June 18, 2022

Lost Cities in the Amazon

From Techthelead:

El Dorado or the Lost City of Z? The legends now seem to be based on fact, thanks to new research undergone using Lidar. A new report published in Nature reveals one lost city in the Amazon, rediscovered using Lidar imaging. Cities of pure gold or lost civilizations full of riches have long been rumored to exist in the jungle of Amazon but their discovery was almost impossible based on the scale of search that had to be undertaken by explorers.

Even more, like the story of the Lost City of Z warns, the quest to find lost Amazonian civilizations has claimed many lives, from adventurers to archaeologists, as the jungle remains dangerous territory to cross. However, that same jungle was home to many cultures and civilizations. Some of them, like the one in this discovery, were incredibly advanced.
“It’s a myth that was created by Europeans who really spoke of a jungle, and vast regions untouched by humans. So a lot of people didn’t want to see that there were archaeological sites here that merit exploration,” co-author Heiko Prümers, of the German Archaeological Institute, told Smithsonian. But what if you could look through the jungle from the air? That’s exactly what the scientists did, uncovering a forgotten city in Bolivia. (Read more.)

From Live Science:

Millions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Amazon basin have revealed evidence of unknown settlements built by a "lost" pre-Hispanic civilization, resolving a long-standing scientific debate about whether the region could sustain a large population, a new study finds. The findings indicate the mysterious Casarabe people — who lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Amazon basin between A.D. 500 and 1400 — were much more numerous than previously thought, and that they had developed an extensive civilization that was finely adapted to the unique environment they lived in, according to the study, published online Wednesday (May 25) in the journal Nature (opens in new tab).
The study researchers used airborne lidar — "light detection and ranging," in which thousands of infrared laser pulses are bounced every second off the terrain to reveal archaeological structures beneath dense vegetation — and discovered several unknown settlements within a network of roads, causeways, reservoirs and canals that was centered on two very large Casarabe settlements, now called Cotoca and Landívar. (Read more.)