It was only in 2016 after poring over all of that detailed imagery that I eventually realized that the homesteads are not a scatter of villages but parts of one entity; a city, rather than a dispersion of homesteads.

Karim Sadr

Categorized in : Science

LiDAR cannot show everything and many of the parts of the city need to investigated on the ground from up close, eventually we will want to excavate some parts of the site and since the deposits are not generally deep, not a lot of earth has to be moved.

I have counted about 800 homesteads in this area and there are probably more, but it is difficult to say how many people occupied the city at any time, since not all the homesteads would have been occupied concurrently and some may have contained many more people than others, my guess is that the city never had more than 10,000 people at any one time, but that is just an educated guess.

It is significant because we did not know that there was a Tswana city this far east of the group that had already been visited by the European travellers at the beginning of the 19th century; so we have extended the range of this archaeological culture and its city-states.