Lasers revealed 5 ancient civilizations that were hiding in plain sight

[Judi Lynn]

Paola Rosa-Aquino Jan 1, 2023, 10:30 AM



LiDAR captured the ruins of a civilization in the Brazilian Amazon. Ecossistema Dakila

Archeologists beam lasers from the sky to unearth ancient settlements hiding in plain sight.

LiDAR uses laser pulses to penetrate dense vegetation, revealing human-built structures underneath.

State-of-the-art laser technology is transforming archaeology by creating 3D renderings of ruins.

In recent years, archaeologists have turned to lasers in order to unearth ancient civilizations that were previously invisible.

A laser technology known as LiDAR — short for light detection and ranging — uses planes to beam thousands of laser pulses from the sky at the ground below, penetrating through thick, deep forest canopy. That provides researchers with three-dimensional maps underneath the vegetation, revealing human-built structures.

From a Mayan city to complex villages deep in the Brazilian Amazon, here are five previously unknown civilizations that were discovered through state-of-the-art LiDAR technology.

A hidden 2,000-year-old Mayan civilization in northern Guatemala



Researchers found a 2,000-year-old Mayan civilization in northern Guatemala using LiDAR. Hansen et al.

Using laser pulses, researchers detected a 2,000-year-old Mayan civilization in northern Guatemala with nearly 1,000 archaeological sites.

More:
https://www.businessinsider.com/ancient-civilizations-that-were-hiding-in-plain-sight-2023-1

Also posted in Anthropology:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/12299031

[malaise]

1. Fabulous

Rec

[erronis]

2. Always looking forward to your research!

And I get lots of scientific journals, periodicals.

Yours frequently point me to something I haven't seen before.

[housecat]

3. Fantastic! Thanks for posting

[judesedit]

4. Thank you for posting such interesting things, Judi Lynn

You keep us learning.

[wiggs]

5. Reminds me of a short story I read decades ago... 'Nightfall', I think, in which

civilizations rise and fall worldwide due to a pattern of global destruction and recovery. And subsequent civilizations have no idea of the civilizations that came before. Asimov maybe?

[StClone]

7. And cultures affected by natural climate change, volcanism, and cosmic fallout.

[reACTIONary]

8. Asimov...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)

[Whatthe_Firetruck]

18. Asimov, yes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightfall_(Asimov_novelette_and_novel)#:~:text=%22Nightfall%22%20is%20a%201941%20science,by%20sunlight%20at%20all%20times.

[CloudWatcher]

6. How are lasers penetrating dense vegetation?

The original article doesn't go into any details about just how the lasers are able to do this. Won't
normal LIDAR pulses just reflect off the canopy? Or are they using super-lasers that burn their
way through the vegetation? How does it work really?

The bottom line is that they send out billions of pulses, most of which do reflect off the canopy.
But a few million get through to the ground and are reflected. The computers process the results
and can tell the difference. Then they stitch it all together to make the jungle seem like it has vanished.

Seriously cool hack.

Here's a nice description of the process:

https://medium.com/supplyframe-hardware/lidar-looking-through-a-jungle-canopy-e19fc40e0f88

[Pobeka]

10. Worked with lidar for about 10 years.

A well designed lidar pulse is basically a lot of photons shaped roughly the size of a soccerball.

As that soccerball mass of photons starts hitting stuff, some of the photons get reflected back to the lidar instrument, which is typically in a airplane. If the object reflects enough photons, the distance to the object is recorded and called a "return". The photons that were not reflected continue on the path, and so there can be more than one return from a single pulse.

There is a whole protocol the vender will use to determine the validity of a lidar return (for example a return can be generated by a bird flying in the air).

There is another protocol for determining that the return most likely made it to the ground, and if so can be classified as a "ground" return.

While the images you see here look solid, the truth is likely only about 10% of the terrain is in the path of a lidar pulse, but still it is more than enough to identify these kinds of structures.

Here's the mind blowing thing about new lidar instruments (new meaning 6 years ago or so): They can give a precision of about 1 cm of the distance from where the return was generated to airplane. That means the clock resolution (how fast the clock runs), has to work at a granularity of the time it takes light to travel 2 cm. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to calculate that time interval.

Absolutely none of this would be practical without a global GPS system, which gives a very precise estimate of the position of the airplane.

[CloudWatcher]

11. Thank you!

Thanks much for the addition info! The ability to accurately stitch all this data together from observations from
moving airplanes is pretty impressive.

[FakeNoose]

12. Very cool! Psychics have predicted that the ruins of ancient civilizations would be found

... in the Mayan areas of Central America. I've read that in different books, but the psychics never said how the ruins would be discovered. I wonder if this LIDAR works underwater by flying over the ocean?

[Pobeka]

14. This lidar doesn't, but there is water penetrating lidar.

It works at a different wavelength.

A google search showed it can reach about 1000 feet deep -- if the laser is powerful enough.

[Judi Lynn]

19. Underwater structures have been spotted, for sure, in the Caribbean.

I've been waiting so long to know when someone decides to start doing some serious study in several places which have been studied superficially. There's so much to learn, clearly!

As technology is developing quickly, it may be sooner than we might think.

[SunSeeker]

13. Very cool. Guatemala should restore it and turn it into a tourist attraction.

Guatemala could use the money.

[JoeOtterbein]

15. K n R ! Thanks for posting!...

...Wow stuff as usual!

[Marcuse]

16. Cool post.

[Judi Lynn]

20. Hoping to find more and more! Thanks.

[Judi Lynn]

21. Haven't run across them, yet, but I've not been looking long enough, either....

As you can see, the people who seized the land after killing the people who lived on it, putting survivors in reservations, tearing up their villages, burning their crops, etc., etc., etc. left very little anywhere which might have concealed anything.....

They even slaughtered millions of buffaloes intentionally, stacking their skulls and bones in huge mountains by the railroad tracks and having trains haul them all off to Canada to be ground and turned into fertilizer.

A lot of effort was made trying to destroy every trace of the people who were here before, as if to cover up the colossal crime against humanity.

I'll bet, in time, there will be discoveries made at long last, anyway!

On edit:

By the way, the former President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro started telling people, back when he was a legislator, that he envied the US's ability to have disappeared practically all the indigenous people, as he wished that could have happened in Brazil.

[FakeNoose]

22. Are you familiar with the Cahokia Mounds in Illinois? Not exactly the same

(Wikipedia link) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia

There are ancient burial mounds that have been partially excavated in central Illinois. Its location near the Mississippi River suggests that possibly a group migrated northward up the river from Central America at least a thousand years before Columbus. Much is unknown since there are no written records found (yet), only carvings and statuary. But the position of the mounds suggests that it might have been a city similar to the Mayan ruins in Mexico.