Research archaeologists with the Missouri State University Center for Archaeological Research are about to embark on a great adventure.
Daniel Pierce and Chris Bodine will head to the Amazon jungle in Brazil this fall to try to learn more about unusual features on the ground. Pierce said they believe those were made by a culture that’s not been documented before.
"We're using lidar (light detection and ranging) imagery first to identify large geoglyphs or manmade features and geometric shapes and designs built into the earth. We use lidar to identify those through the canopy. And then now we're looking to down to Brazil and go down into the jungle and confirm them in person," said Pierce.
Bodine has been processing data from the Amazon and found the large manmade geoglyphs.
"He's the one that made like the initial discoveries of locating some of these designs, what they're typically like. They're different shapes. Sometimes they're squares, the circles, roads," said Pierce. "We found some roads and trails through the jungle, some of them going hundreds of miles, it seems. What this means culturally is, for a culture to create these features, it has to have a lot of kid of like organization of labor."
They're calling it the GOJIRA project (Geoglyph Observations through Jungle Imagery in Remote Amazonia). Researcher Chris Bodine used cutting-edge lidar technology to identify numerous never-seen-before geoglyphs hidden deep within the Brazilian Amazon, according to the team.
By going to the Amazon Rainforest to explore on the ground, they'll be following in the footsteps of others who have explored the area, including British Explorer Percy Fawcett who disappeared in 1925 while searching for what he believed was a lost civilization.
Bodine said he’s excited to travel to Brazil to see for themselves what’s on the jungle floor.
"Some of them (geoglyphs) are 400, 500 feet across, and no one — we have found there's probably several thousand geoglyphs have been found, but no one has actually gone in on the ground to actually see what they actually are," he said. "Nobody knows if there's pottery or there's other cultural artifacts there. We really don't know anything about them except what they look like from the air."
According to Pierce, only a handful of people has been trying to uncover evidence of a lost civilization in the Amazon and most of them have been looking in mostly open, deforested areas through aerial imagery.
"There's really not anybody going down into the jungle to see these things in person and confirm their existence," he said.
Bodine said the Amazon is so dense that a person could go 15 feet from the river and get lost, making the jungle their main obstacle. But the team will use technology like GPS (global positioning system), RTK (real-time kinematic positioning) and GNSS (global navigation satellite system) so they’ll know where they are, and they plan to hire a local guide.
They’ve created an organization called Terra Incognita Research Institute that goes alongside their work at CAR. Pierce said they did that to aid in fundraising and to allow them to solicit private partnerships. A Crowdfunding fundraiser is underway to raise money for their upcoming trip.
Pierce said they could be the first to provide evidence of a new culture in the Amazon, which would shine a light on Springfield and MO State.
"When we think about these types of projects, a lot of times we, you know, outside of the academia world, we think of them as only being like in Hollywood, like that type of stuff doesn't really happen. That's just movies," Pierce said. "But we're showing it — not only does it happen, but it's not just the big schools. It's not just like Harvard out there doing these big things. Like, Missouri State here in Springfield, in the middle of the Ozarks, is just as much of a player in this as, you know, any of these big schools."
Bodine said the trip is a chance to go back in time and do groundbreaking work that not many get to be part of.
"We know so little about the culture," he said. "So, we know about the geoglyphs, but we don't know who built them. We don't even know where the people lived who built them. So they most likely didn't live on or around the geoglyphs. We still don't know where they came from, so there's basically everything to be learned, still to learn. And so it's an amazing opportunity."
A crowdfunding campaign is underway to raise money for the trip to Brazil.
