Saturday 14 July 2012

The Lost City

Right, so...

There's this film trope (which was predated by an equivalent non-film trope) about the Lost City. It is a racist trope that dates back to when archaeologists (and people who pretended to be such) were first seriously exploring Africa (and, to a lesser extent, South America). They found evidence of ancient, or even old, cities and it blew their tiny racist minds.

How could black people build cities? they thought and so told themselves a myth... They started telling stories of ancient white people who must have built the cities and many movies were made about this and all was happy. The modern version of this myth is that it was aliens, but has the same racist assumption that black (or sometimes, brown) people could actually build cities.

The reality is, of course, that there were highly advanced civilisations throughout most of the world when Europe was busy living in its own refuse. TV Tropes has examples under the Real Life section of their trope page Advanced Ancient Acropolis (warning: TV Tropes is a timesink whose fascinating gravity is so strong that it will steal your afternoon very very easily).

But this isn't about that. The Lost City in this case is some really cool rock formations that have formed over thousands of years, that, well, look like a lost city. Walls and statues and towers are here, but they were made by geology not human hands.

Here's some:






More are available, here.

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