Lidar Finds Overgrown Maya Pyramids

AlejoHausner writes "A team of archaeologists scanned the jungle of Belize with lidar. Although most of the reflections came from the jungle canopy, some light reflected off the ground surface. Using this, suddenly hidden pyramids, agricultural terraces, and ancient roads are revealed, at 6-inch resolution. The data allowed the archaeologists to bolster their theory that the ancient city of Caracol covered more than 70 square miles of urban sprawl and supported a population of over 115,000."

Comments

Other uses for this technology

[adeft]

Seems like it might be useful for finding downed aircrafts and other missing objects....maybe even people?

Re:Other uses for this technology

[biryokumaru]

Meh, I think people are too squishy. They'd probably blend in with plants and stuff. Aircraft should work, though.

Re:Other uses for this technology

[pyroclast]

Seems like it might be useful for finding downed aircrafts and other missing objects....maybe even people?

Great thought, but the time to process lidar data takes a while. So planes and objects sure, but even the logistics to get this done takes time. Not sure about people, due to resolution over a vast area and again logistics. The bare-earth relief (which strips away a degree of vegetation) lidar offers is incredible. Cartographers and geologist have only recently really taken advantage of the technology. But in time and $, these other uses could definitely be considered, especially when resolution and processing is more developed.

Re:Other uses for this technology

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Or somebody that found your post funny.

Re:Other uses for this technology

[Aeros]

I dont think the technology is that advanced

Re:Other uses for this technology

[Message]

The summary alluded to this but mostly what you get is reflection off the canopy... when you start talking dense jungle.. triple canopy type areas then this is not going to be effective...

Re:Other uses for this technology

[Mabbo]

Processing the data takes a while- today. In the 80's, MP3 compression was good, but took too long to process for consumer products.

Re:Other uses for this technology

[nharmon]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Real-time_Cueing_Hyperspectral_Enhanced_Reconnaissance

Re:Other uses for this technology

[jd]

Why do you think it took so long to decode? The code had no idea what to do.

Re:Other uses for this technology

[jd]

When working in or around a reflective medium, it is helpful to change the frequency to one that doesn't create so much noise. (RADAR became much more useful over water and in bad weather when the wavelength was shortened.) If something that made the canopy transparent but interesting objects below clear was an easy problem, it would have been done already, rather than relying heavily on computational analysis. However, nothing wrong with analytical techniques, which would still be very useful if a better tuning were found.

Re:Other uses for this technology

[SteveFoerster]

It's amazing what names people will come up with to get a cool sounding acronym....

Re:Other uses for this technology

[BobMcD]

I built an irony detector, but it only detects 'everything but irony'.

Cool.

[2names]

Now find Atlantis.

Re:Cool.

[c4tp]

I was about to say, if Indiana Jones had LIDAR, those movies would be a lot shorter.

Re:Cool.

[PopeRatzo]

Now find Atlantis.

You mock, but the discoveries of megalithic structures over the past twenty years have called into question a lot of our assumptions about the earliest civilizations with technology. There are rock carvings being discovered in the Southern part of Africa that show very advanced understanding of astronomy, geography and time measurement that appear to be over twenty thousand years old which is much, much earlier than previously thought.

If we can ever get scientists to be able to really research the pyramids and nearby structures without the dictatorial control of the Egyptian government, there is reason to believe that there are references to sophisticated understanding of astronomy going back over fifty thousand years.

When I worked at the University of Chicago, I used to hang with people from the Oriental Institute. From them, I learned just how shaky a lot of the theories regarding Early Egyptian culture really are, including but not limited to how in the hell the pyramids were built. One of the foremost Egyptologists in the world once confirmed to me that the accepted theories are clearly ridiculous, that the notion that you can drag, or roll on logs, granite blocks weighing up to 100 tons for several miles, and then erasing every sign of the way in which they were moved, is just nonsense. Further, he'd like to know, how in the hell were they able to move those stones over 100 feet in the air to place them at the top of the pile?

This gentleman, now dead, explained that Egyptology specifically, and archeology generally, are so political that any theory or work done outside the mainstream is killed before it can even be peer-reviewed. This guy, a professor emeritus at the time, told me he'd had a 20 year correspondence with crypto-archeologist Graham Hancock and he was careful to tell me that though he disagreed with most of Hancock's assertions, that some of them deserved much closer consideration. And it's not only academic politics that have shaped our "consensus" regarding those civilizations. Religious and political forces have played an even greater role in making sure that the accepted history supports certain orthodoxies.

Atlantis? Well, probably not, but once you get past 50,000 years it's not at all impossible that there was a relatively advanced civilization on this planet that subsequently disappeared. Almost every native culture on Earth has legends about a "golden age" when a more advanced civilization existed, which then disappeared during a subsequent "dark age".

Re:Cool.

[WED Fan]

Screw Atlantis, I left a prototype G4 phone lying around, can it help me find that?

Re:Cool.

[2names]

I'm not mocking at all. My original post was meant to be serious. It's not my fault that people thought it was funny.

Now get off your educated ass and find Atlantis, dammit.

Re:Cool.

[gyrogeerloose]

once you get past 50,000 years it's not at all impossible that there was a relatively advanced civilization on this planet that subsequently disappeared.

You don't even have to go back that far. The Minoan people of ancient Crete were well on the way to an industrial revolution of of their own that predated that of England by a couple of thousand years. If it wasn't for an inopportune volcanic eruption which completely wiped the Minoans out back around 1400 BCE, we might have had electronic computers by Roman times and those flying cars and jet packs we all wish for by now.

Re:Cool.

[Locke2005]

The Egyptians were experts in using water. Easy to level the base of the pyramids, just flood the whole area on a calm day, and mark the water level. Likewise, why drag/roll stones for miles when you can just build a canal and float them to the work site? With use temporary dykes and thousands of people to pump water up hill, you could practically float them into place and drop them. Of course, there would be no trace left of temporary systems put in place to move stones, be they canals or ramps, any more than there are traces of scaffolding around the great cathedrals.

I also find silly our clinging to the belief that there was absolutely no interaction between Egyptian and South American civilizations, despite growing evidence of "native" South American plants showing up in ancient Egypt. It seems like blatant Euro-centricism to assume that Europeans were the only ones capable of "discovering" new continents, especially since these continents were already inhabited by other peoples!

Re:Cool.

[Chris Burke]

The Minoan people of ancient Crete were well on the way to an industrial revolution of of their own that predated that of England by a couple of thousand years. If it wasn't for an inopportune volcanic eruption which completely wiped the Minoans out back around 1400 BCE,

A volcano... or the horrific results of their experimentation with bio-engineering and the creation of a man-bull hybrid?!

Food for thought.

Re:Cool.

[Whatshisface]

And we would have been only 20 years away from cold fusion and unlimited free power.

Re:Cool.

[Sleepy]

It would be more accurate to say your history books are full of mistruths, but if you want examples, just pick nearly any thing from a high school history book... and then REALLY research it.

1) We're all told that Benedict Arnold was simply a traitor to the American Revolution... but not that he was mistreated prior to that. (note: I'm not drawing judgment, these are simply facts).
2) We're all told that the "Americas" were sparsely populated by a few tens of thousands - not millions - of "natives". The "Trail of Tears" gets about 1/2 page coverage - scant compared to other 19th and 10th century genocides..
3) General Custer died a hero, and was NOT a coward who engaged in genocidal killings of women and infants.
4) Jesus was blonde, blue-eyed, and never took a wife

I'm just rattling off 4 I could think of inside of a few seconds.

(And to any perceived anti-US bias comments, it's untrue to suggest that. I happen to be most familiar with my own culture and therefore capable of poking holes in the lies it teaches. Every culture is guilty of this, but I can't be expected to have the same level of familiarity with those other cultures. Whatever, most people get it right?)

Re:Cool.

[natehoy]

Ah, so THEY are the originators of ManBearPig!

Those crazy Minoans, they got exactly what they deserved.

Re:Cool.

[Monkeedude1212]

Theres also evidence of Ramps around a few pyramids, (though not all, and none of the great ones of Giza I believe).

I think he might have been trolling a bit, their brick wasn't just sand and water, it was a carful mixture, including wheat. A lot of preparation went into preparing the stones, so that they were so strong, which is why they are still standing to this day. Also, the way everything is assembled brick by brick, you'd wonder why the base wouldn't be one giant piece, using his theory.

Re:Cool.

[MontyApollo]

I had a professor once that pretty effectively argued that Crete was Atlantis. I have forgot most of the arguments, but I believe one of them was that if you assumed a common translation error in numbers that Plato might have committed, then the eruption of Thera would coincide very well with the (corrected) time period of Atlantis's fall.

Re:Cool.

[MontyApollo]

I have problem with people making statements about how the pyramids could not be built with the technology available. So called crop circle experts said there was no way humans could be behind crop circles, until they were shown video of two retired guys and a wood plank in fact doing it. People used to talk about how it was scientifically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, but yet it does.

I think some people think too highly of their ability to figure things out, and they don't give other people enough credit for their ingenuity.

Re:Cool.

[gyrogeerloose]

I had a professor once that pretty effectively argued that Crete was Atlantis

Yes, I've heard that too; in fact, one of the books I got my info on the Minoans from suggested the same. Also, that the eruption of Thera was possibly the cause of the parting of the Reed Sea, a shallow marshy area of northern Egypt, which is incorrectly translated as "Red Sea" in the Bible.

Re:Cool.

[osu-neko]

Some interesting reading about these issues can be found in the books of Ralph Ellis. Another researcher who academics publicly label as a "kook" while begrudgingly accepting his conclusions in private.

Yes, but they also begrudgingly admit it's all a conspiracy due to him being behind on his Illuminati dues in private. (Hey wow, I can claim anything I want about what people do "in private" and point to the lack of published acknowledgment as proof! Of course, only a complete and utter fucking moron would believe me, since, of course, if they only do it in private, how the hell would I know?)

Re:Cool.

[Locke2005]

Uh, no. Dig a shallow pit where the base of the pyramid is going to go. Flood it. Mark the water level all around. Now you know exactly where your first course of stones needs to start to be perfectly level. Lower level stones could have been floated into place using dikes and locks, but yes, this is probably impractical for higher level stones. But water could be used to lift stones arbitrarily high by a simple method: build a dike on the opposite side of structure. Add heavy boat and fill with water. Run rope over top of structure to stone you want to lift. Let water out -- lowering boat pulls stone up into place! Later, rinse, repeat. The point being, instead of using hundreds of people to drag a stone, you could use thousands of people or even some windmills to pump water uphill by distributing the pumps all along a long channel.

Re:Cool.

[mjwx]

I also find silly our clinging to the belief that there was absolutely no interaction between Egyptian and South American civilizations

Why?

The level of technological exchange you describe would have required regular communication. Given that the ships of the time could not even cross the Mediterranean safely this is very unlikely. It is not a stretch to think that one Ancient Egyptian or Greek may have crossed the Atlantic (with no understanding of global currents, this would have taken months) but not the level required to trade technologies.

Certain advances are logical steps, writing for example, this is why there is no common root language, Hindi, Arabic, Mayan, far east and Latin scripts are all radically different despite performing the same function. The same with aqueducts and construction techniques. After the fall of the Roman empire, western cultures had to re-learn many building techniques again because the knowledge was lost, but the almost exact same techniques were rediscovered hundreds of years later. Things like lunar calendars can be discovered simply by observations, so many most cultures also used lunar calendars like the Mayans but none were ever as advanced.

Any real contact between cultures over such vast distances were done by migration and empires were a real hindrance to this, the Persians effectively separated the Europeans from the Indians who effectively isolated the Persians from the Chinese. This was not really overcome until the end of the Roman empires. The Ancient Aborigines that came to Australia 40-60,000 years ago did so by migration from Asia via the chains of islands connecting SE Asia to Australia and no real communication was achieved with Australia until 1800. As for crossing a large ocean like the Atlantic or Pacific was perilous in Columbus' day, with ships that were able to store several years of supplies and weather severe storms.

It seems like blatant Euro-centricism

"Euro-Centric" seems to be one of those buzzwords bandied about for something you don't like/agree with. It's entirely logical to conclude that cultures developed similar technologies due to similar needs and observations. Give the evidence for this theory and lack of evidence of regular communication I think this one is fairly safe. Why did the Mayans and Egyptians both build pyramid like structures, because it is logically the best shape for a large structure. The Romans and other Europeans built colosseums whilst the Mayans didn't, Asian cultures built pagoda's whilst Western and American cultures didn't.

Re:Cool.

[PopeRatzo]

Don't you think the difference between poured concrete and quarried stone can be discerned by modern archeologists or engineers?

Fast turnaround

[JustNilt]

What's most impressive to me is how quickly they got the results. It only took a couple days of actual data gathering then a few weeks of lab processing. Last I heard about anything similar (using satellite images, IIRC) it took months to get results.

Very cool stuff.

Research Report URL

[Atraxen]

The NYT article was actually pretty good, but for those who want a bit more 'meat on the bone', here's the 2009 research project report:
http://caracol.cos.ucf.edu/reports/2009.php
There are some nice examples of the LIDAR images at the end of the page in the Figures section.

Re:Research Report URL

[city]

I was there in November and they have done a really good job there leaving some of the city as it exists today overtaken by the jungle and some restored to show how the Maya lived in the cities. You would have no idea the mounds and hills of the jungle are pyramids and structures. The people there say you can't buy land without diggin up a Maya house in your backyard. Today in Belize there are around 300,000 people in the whole country, versus estimations before the Maya collapse of a couple million. For perspective the largest city there today only has 70,000 people.

Re:Any images?

[gstoddart]

To answer my own question ... here is a link.

The NYT has the images so wrapped up in javascript, plugins, and whatnot that noscript didn't let me get to it. :-P

Lidar

[LearnToSpell]

Pretty much my favourite detection system.

Re:They aren't overgrown

[Tukz]

These pyramids aren't overgrown, they're just big stoned, you insensitive clods.

There, fixed it.

Re:Forensic Anthropology

[geekoid]

Assuming those lost people dug their own shallow grave...

I suspect the poster was thinking living people.

Dead people are easy to find, hell I go a whole park full of em not to far from my house.

You'd be surprised how people hate it when I play Frisbee there.

Re:2012?

[schon]

My theory is that 2012 is when all the Mayan computers will crash.

You just know that ~5000 years ago, some Mayan committee somewhere was designing this, and someone said "hey, what happens after year 5335?" and the answer was "who cares? by the time that rolls around, we'll be using something completely different."

It's just like Y2K, except there is nobody around now to fix their code.

Re:Word

[AlejoHausner]

The missing comma strikes again. Kinda like "eats, shoots, and leaves."