Deforestation in the Amazonian jungle has uncovered the remnants of a previously unknown civilization.

The traditional view is that before the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 15th century there were no complex societies in the Amazon basin – in contrast to the Andes further west where the Incas built their cities. Now deforestation, increased air travel and satellite imagery are telling a different story.

“It’s never-ending,” says Denise Schaan of the Federal University of Pará in Belém, Brazil, who made many of the new discoveries from planes or by examining Google Earth images. “Every week we find new structures.” Some of them are square or rectangular, while others form concentric circles or complex geometric figures such as hexagons and octagons connected by avenues or roads. The researchers describe them all as geoglyphs.

Their discovery, in an area of northern Bolivia and western Brazil, follows other recent reports of vast sprawls of interconnected villages known as “garden cities” in north central Brazil, dating from around AD 1400. But the structures unearthed at the garden city sites are not as consistently similar or geometric as the geoglyphs, Schaan says.

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Now you can explore the ancient city of Pompeii through Google Street View.

Among the ruins visible on the search engine’s free mapping application are the town’s statues, temples, villas and theatres.

Italy’s Culture Ministry said it hopes that the exposure will inspire tourists to visit Pompeii to see it in the flesh.

Mario Resca, from the ministry’s heritage promotion department, said: “The possibility of to walk virtually between the wonders of Pompeii represents an extraordinary promotional vehicle for the Italian tourism.

“I think that far from putting off potential tourists to come in person to visit it will actually encourage more to visit two archaeological centres.”

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Archaeologists are employing new technology to aid in their excavations of Civil War sites.

A small but growing number of Georgia archaeologists and history buffs are starting to use high-tech gear, ground-penetrating radar, metal detectors, new software programs and detective-style techniques to detail with amazing precision what happened when U.S. Gen. William T. Sherman made good on his promise to “make Georgia howl.”

Decades ago, archaeology was about spades, notebooks and educated guesses. You found a field where you thought something might have been, and you dug pits. Trying to piece together what happened on a battlefield for several hours of one day more than a century ago seemed preposterous.

This was especially true in metro Atlanta, where bulldozers have been working overtime for decades. But now this loose group of experts call them Civil War CSI are on the case. They still use historical records and spades, but they also use a whole lot more.

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Hundreds of thousand of photos uploaded to Flickr have been used to create 3D models of the major historical sites in Rome as well as other European cities.

The team used a specially-devised algorithm to detect and arrange photos showing various angles of the same building. The same algorithm then analysed these images – taking into account the viewpoint of the photographer – to produce composite 3D models

Rome’s most famous landmarks were generated in less than 24 hours from 150,000 photos, while 250,000 images were scanned to make 3D models of Venice.

Jarrod Burks explains how radar technology has changed the way archaeologists dig in the dirt.

“Instead of throwing a dart into the middle of 40 acres, this accurately says ‘Here’s a bulls-eye,’ ” said Rick Perkins, chief ranger at the Hopewell Cultural National Park.

Outside his office at Ohio Valley Archeology on Sinclair Road, Burks recently demonstrated the technology. He peered down at a screen on a radar machine that he slowly rolled over a stretch of blacktop.

A black arch appeared – a pipe, he said, about 3 feet below the surface.