In 2018, a laser scanner flying over the forests of Guatemala did in a few weeks what a century of machetes could not. It stripped away the canopy and revealed tens of thousands of Maya structures, roads and causeways that nobody knew were there.The age of great archaeological discovery is not over. It is accelerating.Beneath the Sands and Jungles takes you to twenty lost cities on land - the ones we have found, and the ones explorers are still searching for.PART I - THE CITIES WE HAVE FOUNDWalk the streets of Pompeii and Akrotiri, stopped mid-sentence by volcanic ash. Cross the brick avenues and engineered drains of Mohenjo-Daro. Follow the water channels that made Petra possible in a desert, and the river that moved and killed Loulan. Climb to Machu Picchu and to the Ciudad Perdida, a thousand stone steps above the Colombian jungle. Stand inside Great Zimbabwe, and see what colonial archaeology tried to take from it.PART II - THE CITIES STILL BEING SEARCHEDFollow the conquistadors after El Dorado, and four centuries of attempts to drain the lake that started the legend. Walk into the Mato Grosso with Percy Fawcett, who never walked out - and see what was actually there. Cross the Empty Quarter after Iram of the Pillars, the Sahara after the white city of Zerzura, and the Kalahari after a lost city that may never have existed.WHAT MAKES THIS BOOK DIFFERENT- Forty-four original maps and diagrams, drawn for this book- Every chapter separates what archaeologists have proved from what is still disputed - no mystery is oversold, and none is dismissed- Each chapter ends with a practical guide to visiting the site today, or an honest answer about why you cannot- Fully referenced, with sources listed chapter by chapterBook Three of the Beneath series, after Beneath the Surface and Beneath the Waves.
