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Laser Scans Reveal Maya 'Megalopolis' Below Guatemalan Jungle (nationalgeographic.com)
Laser-toting archaeologists have discovered an entire new city in the Central American jungle, the National Geographic reported this week. From the report: In what's being hailed as a "major breakthrough" in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala. Using a revolutionary technology known as LiDAR (short for "Light Detection And Ranging"), scholars digitally removed the tree canopy from aerial images of the now-unpopulated landscape, revealing the ruins of a sprawling pre-Columbian civilization that was far more complex and interconnected than most Maya specialists had supposed. "The LiDAR images make it clear that this entire region was a settlement system whose scale and population density had been grossly underestimated," said Thomas Garrison, an Ithaca College archaeologist and National Geographic Explorer who specializes in using digital technology for archaeological research.
I'm reading "Lost City of the Monkey God" by Douglas Preston right now. It's been a highly entertaining first-hand account of (what I think was) the first use of LIDAR for archaeology in the jungles of Central America, and the ground exploration that followed. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone who's interested in this story.
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This use of a new technology to uncover a lost megalopolis likely illustrates a very early casualty of global warming. This drain this many people put on the ecosphere, the tremendous harvesting of trees and generation of CO2 both through respiration, livestock, and burning and obliteration of the regions wildlife resulted in their eventual self destruction and downfall. We need to recognize this as our future if we do not adjust our lifestyles; the Maya may be lost forever in the mists of history but the magnificent remains they left behind can serve warning to us who come after and uncover them of what can happen when a society ignores and tries to subvert mother nature and refuses to change.