At nearly 3,850 meters above sea level, frost arrives almost nightly on Bolivia’s Altiplano. Modern visitors struggle to breathe. Yet between 500 and 1100 CE, tens of thousands of people not only survived here but thrived, building one of the Andes’ first true cities. Tiwanaku engineers developed raised-field agriculture systems that used thermal physics to
A new study of a Zapotec site in Mexico may have finally revealed its purpose. A team using LiDAR to analyze the complex have revealed a large post-classical city. The site of Guiengola is well known to Mexican archaeologists. Built by the Zapotec, an indigenous pre-Columbian culture who lived in the Valley of Oaxaca in