Tag: Mayan

Lidar reveals a hidden Mayan city

A relief of the ancient Maya site archaeologists are calling Ocomtún. (Image: Žiga Kokalj/ZRC SAZU)

In a biological preserve in Mexico’s Campeche State, a team of archaeologists have documented pyramids, palaces, a ball court and other remains of an ancient city they call Ocomtún, reported the New York Times.

Archeologists surveyed the site for six weeks in May and June, finding 50-foot-tall (15.2-meter-tall) structures resembling pyramids, as well as pottery and Mayan engravings they believe date to between 600 and 900 AD. The team determined the city was likely abandoned more than 1,000 years ago.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) hailed their findings late last month, saying they discovered the ancient city in “a vast area practically unknown to archaeology.”

“I’m often asked why nobody has come there, and I say, ‘Well, probably because you need to be a little nuts to go there,” said Ivan Sprajc, the survey’s lead archaeologist and a professor at a Slovenian research center, ZRC SAZU. “It’s not an easy job.”

Surveying the area has been revolutionized over the last decade by lidar — allowing researchers to survey densely forested areas that are difficult to explore on foot. Archeologists were able to use airborne lasers to pierce through dense vegetation and reveal the ancient structures and human-modified landscapes beneath.

INAH described the site as having once been a major center of Mayan life. Surrounded by wetlands, Ocomtún includes pyramids, plazas, elite residences and “strange” complexes of structures arranged almost in concentric circles, Dr. Sprajc told CNN.

“For example, we have several very curious architecture complexes of structures which are arranged in almost concentric circles. So, we are only guessing what this could be. Perhaps marketplaces,” he added.

Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History team plans to return next year for further investigation.

August 8, 2023
Mapping Marvel: Lost cities found

Photo: Mlenny/iStock/Getty Images Plus

GPS and airborne light detection and ranging (lidar) have revolutionized archaeology. In just a little more than a decade, dozens of previously hidden cities and settlements have been discovered under heavy tree canopy and in other terrain. Many of the sites are in difficult-to-access areas, such as high atop mountains, in vast deserts, or enclosed in thick, nearly impenetrable foliage. Many were only the stuff of legend.

Others are right under our feet. In 2018, early settlements were uncovered in New England, including now-abandoned walls, roads and building foundations.

With the development of lidar, archaeologists gained perhaps their most powerful tool since carbon dating. Lidar began as a million-dollar classified technology. Now lidar units are small enough to attach to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Lidar devices send more than 100,000 laser pulses to the ground every second and use their return times to calculate precise elevation data that allow researchers to build three-dimensional maps of a landscape, while GPS receivers provide its coordinates. Lidar fly-overs have revealed ancient cities, temples, causeways, irrigation systems and other structures, which are then ground-truthed by excavation teams.

“Lidar has completely changed the way we survey ancient Maya cities and what we can know about them, and it is a thousand times better than [what we used] before,” Francisco Estrada-Belli told GPS World. Estrada-Belli is a research professor at Tulane University’s Middle American Research Institute.

The application of lidar to archaeology began in 2009, when NASA sponsored a remote-sensing project that showed lidar’s usefulness below the forest canopy. The project revealed the surprisingly vast scope of Caracol, the largest Mayan archaeological site in Belize. Urban Caracol maintained a population of more than 100,000 people with an immense agricultural field system and elaborate city planning.

Since then, lidar has been used the world over to uncover buried secrets from early Roman fortifications in Italy to landscape changes from World War I. Just this August, lidar unearthed sobering evidence of a massacre by Nazi Germany in Poland during World War II.

Image: F. Estada-Belli/Pacunam Lidar InitiativePhoto:

A landmark project in Guatemala illustrates the benefits of lidar. The ancient city of Tikal was one of the best-mapped regions of the Mayan world, but the Pacunam Lidar Initiative quintupled the amount of mapping done in 50 years in a single summer, with 61,000 structures found in an 810-square-mile area invisible to the naked eye because of overgrown vegetation. What experts had mistaken for unusable swampland, for instance, had actually been farmland, crisscrossed with canals. The area may have been home to a population of up to 10 million people. Results were published in Science in 2018.

October 1, 2021
Lidar and UAV reveal Mayan "megalopolis" below Guatemalan jungle

Lidar and UAV technology has revealed hundreds of previously unknown Mayan ruins in the Guatemalan rainforest.

The Optech Titan stripped away overlying vegetation to reveal extensive Mayan ruins in Guatemala’s rainforest. (Image:
Teledyne Optech)

In what is considered biggest aerial lidar survey in the history of archaeology, a vast and complex civilization has been discovered.

The University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) used Teledyne Optech’s Titan sensor to identify raised highways, and complex irrigation and terracing systems.

The jungle of Central America is one of the last great frontiers of archaeology, according to National Geographic, which covered the new finds in a recent documentary, Lost Treasures of The Maya Snake Kings.

After the collapse of the Mayan civilization, its cities and monuments were quickly covered by thick rainforest, hiding it from airborne observation and making it very difficult to survey on foot. Over decades of work, the ancient civilization has gradually been revealed. But now technology is set to change everything.

Lidar digitally removes the forest canopy to reveal ancient ruins below, showing that Maya cities such as Tikal were much larger than ground-based research had suggested. (Photo: National Geographic)

Flying high above the rainforest, the Titan’s lasers penetrated the canopy to collect almost a million data points per second from the forest floor, giving archaeologists a “bare earth” view of the structures underneath.

Having covered 2,100 square kilometers, the Titan’s data revealed massive amounts of ruins hidden below the forest, showing that their urban centers were significantly larger than archaeologists had previously thought.

“Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist, told National Geographic. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

(Image:
Teledyne Optech)

“We are incredibly proud and excited that our award winning Titan multispectral lidar sensor has contributed to this spectacular discovery,” said Michel Stanier, EVP and general manager of Teledyne Optech. “The Titan’s ability to strip away overlying vegetation and map wide areas very quickly and accurately makes it an important tool for archaeologists, and we expect to see many more discoveries coming from it and our other airborne laser terrain mappers.”

The Optech Titan multi-spectral lidar sensor incorporates three independent laser wavelengths into a single sensor design, with beams at 532, 1064 and 1550 nanometers (0.5/1.0/1.5 microns) and a ground sampling rate of 300 kHz per beam.

Because Titan uses both green and infrared channels, it is capable of simultaneous water-depth mapping and high-precision 900-kHz topography.

Titan can also be used for purposes such as vegetative and forestry applications, which require multiple wavelengths for improved classification accuracy and carbon credit counting initiatives.

February 20, 2018
Lidar and UAV reveal Mayan ‘megalopolis’ below Guatemalan jungle

Lidar and UAV technology has revealed hundreds of previously unknown Mayan ruins in the Guatemalan rainforest.

The Optech Titan stripped away overlying vegetation to reveal extensive Mayan ruins in Guatemala’s rainforest. (Image:
Teledyne Optech)

In what is considered biggest aerial lidar survey in the history of archaeology, a vast and complex civilization has been discovered.

The University of Houston’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping (NCALM) used Teledyne Optech’s Titan sensor to identify raised highways, and complex irrigation and terracing systems.

The jungle of Central America is one of the last great frontiers of archaeology, according to National Geographic, which covered the new finds in a recent documentary, Lost Treasures of The Maya Snake Kings.

After the collapse of the Mayan civilization, its cities and monuments were quickly covered by thick rainforest, hiding it from airborne observation and making it very difficult to survey on foot. Over decades of work, the ancient civilization has gradually been revealed. But now technology is set to change everything.

Lidar digitally removes the forest canopy to reveal ancient ruins below, showing that Maya cities such as Tikal were much larger than ground-based research had suggested. (Photo: National Geographic)

Flying high above the rainforest, the Titan’s lasers penetrated the canopy to collect almost a million data points per second from the forest floor, giving archaeologists a “bare earth” view of the structures underneath.

Having covered 2,100 square kilometers, the Titan’s data revealed massive amounts of ruins hidden below the forest, showing that their urban centers were significantly larger than archaeologists had previously thought.

“Lidar is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy,” Francisco Estrada-Belli, a Tulane University archaeologist, told National Geographic. “We’ll need 100 years to go through all [the data] and really understand what we’re seeing.”

(Image:
Teledyne Optech)

“We are incredibly proud and excited that our award winning Titan multispectral lidar sensor has contributed to this spectacular discovery,” said Michel Stanier, EVP and general manager of Teledyne Optech. “The Titan’s ability to strip away overlying vegetation and map wide areas very quickly and accurately makes it an important tool for archaeologists, and we expect to see many more discoveries coming from it and our other airborne laser terrain mappers.”

The Optech Titan multi-spectral lidar sensor incorporates three independent laser wavelengths into a single sensor design, with beams at 532, 1064 and 1550 nanometers (0.5/1.0/1.5 microns) and a ground sampling rate of 300 kHz per beam.

Image: Teledyne Optech

Because Titan uses both green and infrared channels, it is capable of simultaneous water-depth mapping and high-precision 900-kHz topography.

Titan can also be used for purposes such as vegetative and forestry applications, which require multiple wavelengths for improved classification accuracy and carbon credit counting initiatives.

February 20, 2018