Aurania Resources (TSXV: ARU) reported that its field team working at the Lost Cities – Cutucu project may have found another ancient road which could solidify the belief that the property is at one of Ecuador’s lost gold mining centres.
In a press release, Aurania explained that the feature interpreted as a very old road needs to be verified and assessed by a qualified and Ecuador-registered archaeologist as soon as the covid19-related restrictions are lifted in the area.
The Lost Cities – Cutucu project, in the southeastern province of Morona-Santiago, consists of 42 concessions located in the central part of the Cordillera de Cutucu. The area contains clusters of porphyry copper, gold-copper skarn and epithermal gold deposits
The possible road was identified beneath deep jungle cover in LiDAR or Light Detection And Ranging imagery, a method by which millions of pulses of light are directed downwards from a helicopter flying about 500 metres above the ground. The pulses are reflected back to a detector, and instantaneous measurements of the distance travelled result in an image of the surface.
“In the dense jungle, the vast majority of the reflections are off the vegetation, but some pulses do get through to the floor of the jungle,” Aurania’s brief reads. “The classification of the data determines the furthest reflection and assumes that it was reflected off the ground, to provide a ‘bare earth’ image in which it appears that the vegetation has been removed.”
The Toronto-based junior is using LiDAR to refine geological targets for gold and copper exploration and to identify possible remnants of infrastructure from Colonial Spanish times related to gold mining in the ‘lost cities’ of Logroño and Sevilla.
“Along with the 2.5 kilometres road segment discovered by our field teams late last year, currently being evaluated by a registered archaeologist and the National Institute of Cultural Heritage of Ecuador, we believe that the feature identified in the LiDAR data represents infrastructure related to that mining activity,” Aurania’s chairman and CEO, Keith Barron, said in the release.
“Sevilla de Oro” and “Logroño de Los Caballeros” were two gold-producing cities described in historic manuscripts from Ecuador, Peru, Spain and the Vatican. Mines in the area were supposedly active between 1565 and 1606.