On the day of the first mission, the smoke was so dense that the aircraft had to be grounded. The end of the dry season coincides with savannah burning which is increasing year by year accelerated by the vicious cycle of climate change and human land-use transformations. Lidar field seasons are an emotional roller coaster, and this one was no exception. Robinson integrating the lidar sensor to the helicopter (Credit: Jose Iriarte) We timed the lidar scan for the end of the dry season in early October 2019 when many trees in the region lose leaves, which in turn, facilitates the penetration of the canopy by our ‘lasers in the sky’. As a result, debates on South American urbanism (with the exception of the ' Garden Cities' of the Upper Xingu) continued to be dominated by Andean contexts. However, until recently, discussions on early urbanism were mostly downplayed and the application of lidar survey is rather new and very limited in Amazonia. In the last decades, the application of lidar technology in tropical forested regions, including the Maya area, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Africa and India, have ‘peeled back’ the impenetrable vegetation to produce a significant reappraisal of traditional concepts of urbanism. Social aggregation into urban spaces is arguably one of the most important processes of our Holocene human history, with consequences for demographic growth and the emergence of hierarchical and centralised societies. The context provided an ideal challenge on which to apply the lidar system, which ultimately lead to the documentation of a level of Amazonian urbanism that rivals its more famous Andean neighbours. A chance discussion at a conference in Bolivia brought together Prümers and Jaimes Betancourt's extensive archaeological research in the region with the pioneering development of a flexible lidar system developed by Iriarte and Robinson during the Pre-Columbian Amazon-Scale Transformations project. Years later, the time would come to apply this method to the southern sector of Llanos de Moxos. Previous use of lidar by Prümers and collaborators in the north-western sector of the Llanos de Moxos revealed what this new technology can do showing an unprecedented network of ditch systems beneath the forest enclosing villages of more than 200 ha. However, tropical forests do not give up their secrets easily the vestiges, scale and complexity of these past societies lie concealed under the forest canopy. The Swedish anthropologist Erland Nordenskiöld who carried out the first excavations in the Llanos de Moxos was impressed by the sophistication of the Casarabe culture ceramics. The British geographer Colonel Fawcett started his search for the fabled lost city of the Amazon in Bolivia in the early 1900s only to mysteriously disappear in the headwater of the Xingu River a few years after. Archaeologists long suspected that some of the most complex pre-Columbian societies in the whole Amazonian basin could be found in the Bolivian Amazon's Llanos de Moxos.
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