How we recreated a lost African city with laser technology | Karim Sadr | TEDxJohannesburg
About 200 years ago, long before Johannesburg was established, there was an African city that flourished near the same location. According to records, a European expedition of the time estimated the city at anywhere between 7500 to 24000 people big – greater than Cape Town was, at that time. This city, named Leetakoo, was the capital of the Batlhaping people, a subset of the Batswana nation. It turned out that Leetakoo was not an isolated case, and there were other such cities throughout the region. Thanks to LiDAR technology, Karim Sadr and his team have recreated Kweneng, one of the more significant cities. In astounding, granular detail, he presents the images, and the story behind them, in this fascinating talk.
Karim Sadr is a professor of archaeology at the University of the Witwatersrand. He has been in Southern Africa since 1990 and has produced a hundred scholarly publications on various aspects of African archaeology. Since 2008 he has been studying the ancient stone walled settlements between the Witwatersrand and the River Vaal. His remote sensing studies using satellite and LiDAR imagery have shown that this was the domain of a Tswana city-state which flourished in the early nineteenth century. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
