Friday curious. 2 pieces of archeological gusto

[kiaa]

These must be exciting days for archeologists and history junkies in general...

Exhibit 1.
An ancient, massive urban complex has been found in the Ecuadorian Amazon

The site includes thousands of human-made mounds along with roads and agricultural fields



Exhibit 2.
Discovery of immense fortifications dating back 4,000 years in north-western Arabia

The North Arabian Desert oases were inhabited by sedentary populations in the 4th and 3rd millennia BCE. A fortification enclosing the Khaybar Oasis -- one of the longest known going back to this period -- was just revealed by a team of scientists. This new walled oasis is, along with that of Tayma, one of the two largest in Saudi Arabia.

Comments

[garote]

I will forever remember the first time I opened the Google Earth desktop app, and started scrolling through Mongolia on a whim, and found a giant earthworks about 10km east of a town, tucked between two mountains and next to a river floodplain. It looked like the fortifications of an ancient city. I embarked on a quest all around the internet, in bits and pieces for about a year, to figure out what the hell I was looking at, and there was zero information on it anywhere. There's probably a half-dozen people in the nearby town who have some rough idea of what that use to be, and I have no way of contacting them.

So I mapped a bunch of cycling routes and still have vague plans to pass by it on a tour some day...