Long-Lost Remains Of Ancient City In South Pacific Rewrites History

"This is a very different kind of city," says the lead author of the new study.

TOM HALE
Senior Journalist

Edited
by Francesca Benson



A LIDAR scan imaging of the pacific island of Tongatapu, Tonga.
LiDAR scans showed the island of Tongatapu was home to low-density urbanization 700 years earlier than previously thought

Image credit: Phillip Parton/ANU.

Lasers have been used to uncover a long-lost city's remains on the Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga. Placed along the idyllic Pacific shores and palm trees, the ancient ruins show that urban environments emerged in the region way earlier than thought – and long before Europeans arrived.

Archeologists at the Australian National University used aerial LiDAR scanning to map the landscape of Tongatapu, which hosts Tonga's capital city, Nukuʻalofa.

This revealed imprints of settlements that shared the traits of other urban settlement systems found elsewhere in the world, including extensive roads, fortifications, communal structures, and thousands of earth mounds. They also found evidence of large soil mounds called sia heu lupe that were constructed for the sport of pigeon snaring.

“Earth structures were being constructed in Tongatapu around AD 300. This is 700 years earlier than previously thought,” lead study author Phillip Parton, PhD scholar of archaeology at the Australian National University in Canberra, said in a statement.

More:
https://www.iflscience.com/long-lost-remains-of-ancient-city-in-south-pacific-rewrite-history-73836