© Karim Sadr
The vast area where the lost city, known as Kweneng, once stood.
The vast area where the lost city, known as Kweneng, once stood.
The newly discovered city, called Kweneng, was once a thriving capital that existed from the 1400s until it was destroyed and abandoned, likely because of civil wars, in the 1820s, said Karim Sadr, a professor of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand, in South Africa.
However, it's not clear if this conflict immediately sounded the city's death knell. That's because some of the remaining structures date to between 1825 and 1875, "in what we call the terminal phase" of Kweneng, Sadr told Live Science.
Researchers have known about Kweneng since at least the 1960s, but they didn't realize its actual size until now, Sadr said. Revil Mason, the retired director of archaeological research at Witwatersrand University, discovered pre-colonial structures there during an aerial survey in 1968.
"He spotted a number of ruins, but far fewer than are actually present," Sadr said. The city is hidden under a thick layer of vegetation, Sadr said. But in 2012, Sadr analyzed satellite images from Google Earth, and found that Kweneng had twice as many structures as previously realized. And now, with the new aerial survey using lidar - or light detection and ranging - Sadr and his colleagues discovered that "there were actually three times as many structures as Mason had initially identified," Sadr said.
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