Satellite images, Lidar… High-performance technical means are deployed to bring to light traces of ancient forgotten cities.
Ray Winstone and Harrison Ford in "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" (2008).
This article by Bernadette Arnaud is an extract from the file "The Great Adventure of the Lost Cities" of Sciences et Avenir 851 (dated January 2018).
Satellite images, drones, lidars (light detection and ranging, remote sensing system by airborne scanner), radiometric thermal cameras, seismic tomography, underground resistivity measurement..., archaeologists now have a very wide range of techniques to unearth the slightest trace of architecture buried over increasingly vast geographical areas, under the cover of forests, a few meters underground or in the sand of the desert.
For the time being, while there are no longer any territories that humans would truly ignore, many have never been visited, due to their inaccessibility and isolation, such as certain regions of East Africa. like the Mount Mabu forest discovered only in 2005, in the heart of Mozambique. So, who would have imagined that in 2017 researchers could find imposing geoglyphs in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon, these gigantic figures traced on the ground, stigmata of ancient constructions scattered over huge areas of jungle? These lands, considered until then as “virgin” of any human presence, had in fact been occupied… 6000 years ago.
Many regions of the world are still being studied by archaeologists and historians in an attempt to find traces of ancient cities mentioned in ancient texts or identified by imaging techniques, in Africa, Asia or America. Among them François-Xavier Fauvelle-Aymar (author of the Golden Rhinoceros, ed. Alma), CNRS research director at the Traces laboratory, at the University of Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès, discoverer in 2006 in Ethiopia of three medieval Muslim cities "whose existence was only known by rare writings" . The archaeologist now hopes to locate the ancient capital of the Mali Empire, described by al-Umari and Ibn Battuta in the 14 th century; or the country of Sofala of the Arabs, where the gold of the Zanj merchants transited and of which we know today only the Portuguese fort of the XV th century but not the earlier Swahili city, “which could be in present-day Mozambique », specifies the historian.
In search of Sodom and Gomorrah
Some American archaeologists have gone in search of Sodom and Gomorrah, the two sinful cities destroyed by divine fire and sulfur according to the Bible. Specialists are looking for traces of it in the Bronze Age, somewhere in the Jordan Valley. Others, like the American anthropologist Damien Marken, focus on the vast valleys of the Petén, hidden in the deep forests of Guatemala in Central America, in search of royal tombs and ancient Mayan cities.
A race against time is also engaged by scientists to locate any remains in areas currently threatened by conflict or looting. Thus in the region of Ulaan Uul in Mongolia, where many potential sites are victims of uncontrolled urbanization, like what is happening in the region of ancient Cyrene, in Libya. Not to mention the deleterious effects of ongoing climate change. Irreversible degradation that many cities in the Near East have already suffered, or sites in Central Asia due to desertification, but also in Siberia, victim of the melting permafrost.
Often far from any academic rigor, many are also amateurs, explorers and adventurers, to try their luck as did the British colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who disappeared in 1925 when he had left in the footsteps of the mysterious city of Z, believed to be located in the Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. The American journalist David Grann affirmed in 2005 that the ruins of Kuhikugu, recently discovered by Michael Heckenberger, professor of archeology at the University of Florida (United States), could be at the origin of the legend of this mythical city. Atlantis in the Mediterranean or Paititi in the Andes are also the subject of tireless research such as that conducted by Thierry Jamin since 1998:the highly controversial French adventurer is convinced that he will one day succeed in exhuming this legendary city which would have served as a refuge for the last Incas but which no archaeological work has ever attested. The lost cities have not finished making people dream.