Earth Resources 2 pilot at 65,000 feet over Alaska, USA, 2014. The Earth Resources 2 (ER-2) high-altitude aircraft was used to carry the MABEL (Multiple Altimeter Beam Experimental Lidar,) instrument to study glaciers and ice sheets. The pilots were Tim Williams (seen here), and Denis Steele | Photo by Heritage Space/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In 2006, Charles C. Mann published a highly provocative book called 1491. The premise was how the Americas looked just before Columbus arrived (he wrote an equally interesting book called 1493 about the way the world changed after Columbus’s journey).
It’s really a remarkable book about some archeological ideas that seemed completely out there back in 2006, including the notion that there were far vaster populations in much of Latin America and the idea that the Amazon might be largely man-made.
At the time, there was an uproar over some of the ideas that were being discussed but if you read that book now, a lot of the radicals have been vindicated. One of the biggest tools that has revolutionized archeology is LiDAR, a laser technology which scans the earth beneath the canopy, and just this past week, a Ph.D. student at Tulane announced that he had found a vast forgotten Mayan city in Mexico.
Amazingly, Luke Auld-Thomas discovered the data sort of in plain sight: it had already been scanned and posted online for other purposes. The site includes houses, pyramids, a dam and a ball court for what is called the Maya Ballgame.
Some day the entire planet will have been scanned with Lidar and we’ll learn many things about our forgotten history that will no doubt be mind-boggling. Imagine that there are other Mayan cities in the Yucatan, more Gobekli Tepis and a scan of the Roman Empire from one end to the other.
As Howard Carter might have said, we will find wonderful things.
This underwater city builder had me more emotionally invested in my corals than SimCity does in my human citizens, and you can try it at the next Steam Next Fest
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