Thanks to the advent of laser technology in archaeology, researchers from the University of Witwatersrand have uncovered a lost metropolis.

Where is the lost city of Kweneng located?

Source: Wits University

The ancient city of Kweneng is believed to be a 200-year-old stretch of land that is located about 50km south of Johannesburg.

Professor Karim Sadr led a team of achaeologists to excavate the area. Even more exciting is the advanced laser technology the team used to map out satellite images of the city that once housed a colony of up to 20 000 citizens.

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How did laser technology develop images of Kweneng?

Source: Wits University

Featured on a BBC News report from October 2018 is a video showing how the researchers were able to recreate this moment from centuries ago. In it, Professor Sadr explained, in great detail, how the laser technology was able to create, with impressive accuracy, the ancient city.

“As soon as each pulse (sent out by the lasers) hits an object, any solid object, a bird, a leaf or a tree or the ground, it reflects that straight back into the machine. “The machine can then figure out where that interception took place in three dimensions,” he explained.

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A brief history on the ancient metropolis

Source: BBC documentary

Professor Sadr believes that Kweneng was once home to the Setswana-speaking people. In many respects, it was a thriving city with hundreds of homesteads and trade networks.

The professor holds a strong view that the city functioned similarly to how ours do in contemporary times. It had different levels of government, a civilised burial tradition and civic duties.

“There were four or five levels of local government, probably with regiments organised by age that could be called up for civic work or war. They buried their important dead under the walls of the central cattle enclosures but there was a very strong egalitarian tradition and the king went out of his way to not stand out,”

Professor Sadr has the extinction date of the ancient city marked at around the end of the 18th century, right before the birth of the city of Johannesburg.

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Based on archaeological evidence, it may be that the inhabitants of the city were affected by mass killings or some sort of mass wipe out.

“My guess is that the whole city was hit hard. The question is whether it was totally destroyed,” he added.

It’s an incredible feat to find a way to open up a window that could allow us to peer into our rich and complex past.

Watch: How the ancient city of Kweneng was reconstructed