“I was on something like page 16 of Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organisation for environmental monitoring,” explains Luke Auld-Thomas, a PhD student at Tulane university in the US.
It was a Lidar survey, a remote sensing technique which fires thousands of laser pulses from a plane and maps objects below using the time the signal takes to return.
But when Mr Auld-Thomas processed the data with methods used by archaeologists, he saw what others had missed - a huge ancient city which may have been home to 30-50,000 people at its peak from 750 to 850 AD.
3 Comments
jaybone@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1y
I’m not reading the whole article but I wanted to see pictures. They have a picture with this caption: There are no pictures of the city but it had pyramid temples similar to this one in nearby Calakmul
Deceptichum@quokk.au · 1 pts · 1y
veroxii@aussie.zone · 6 pts · 1y
They probably run some algorithms to look for straight lines and right angles to identify man made structure vs natural features.
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee · 4 pts · 1y
Probably looking for different signatures than other surveyors do