Archaeologists used Google Earth to help find 3,000 square miles of prehistoric settlements from a new-found civilization in Central Europe

• A new study found evidence of a previously unknown network of societies living in Central Europe in the Late Bronze Age.
• Researchers used satellite images from Google Earth to find 100 new prehistoric sites.

Archeologists have discovered evidence of a previously unknown prehistoric civilization spanning 3,000 square miles across Central Europe. And Google Earth helped them do it.

Experts have long believed that an advanced civilization that thrived in Central Europe during the Early and Middle Bronze Age, beginning in 2200 BC, was abandoned by 1600 BC.

But, in a study published this month in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE, a team of researchers revealed new evidence that the exact opposite may have happened — the civilization did not disappear but simply spread out into a vast, complex network of smaller societies.

"We contest the idea of a diminished Late Bronze Age and argue that a fully opposite trajectory can be identified–increased scale, complexity and density in settlement systems and intensification of long-distance networks," the authors wrote.

The researchers used historical imagery from Google Earth and satellite data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-2 to find 100 new prehistoric sites in the Pannonian Plain, a region that includes modern-day Hungary.

Their research suggests that the central hubs, or "megaforts," of the Early to Middle Bronze Age civilization did not actually disappear in the 16th century as previously thought, but rather, became decentralized. The newly-formed interconnected settlements were less hierarchical than the preceding society, but still organized in political units, the researchers believe.

"In our view, what collapsed was the political/ideological regimes, and widespread participation in these," the authors reported. "Despite these fundamental shifts in how people organized themselves in settlements and communities, features of daily life such as craft, rituals, and diet reveal resilience in macrocultural traits of the general populace."