I'm starting to tread on The Silicon Graybeard's turf, but this is really cool:
Satellites are helping scientists spot more ancient Mayan ruins than ever before, which is no small feat considering how thick the forest is in the indigenous group's ancestral lands.
"Archeologists have mapped more Mayan sites, buildings and features in the past 10 years than we had in the past — preceding — 150 years," Brett Houk, an archaeology professor at Texas Tech University, told attendees at a NASA-led space archaeology conference Sept. 18 to which Space.com received an exclusive invite.
Archaeologists are finding these ruins faster due to better satellite technology. Using a pulsed laser technique called lidar, or light detection and ranging, satellites can peer through the dense canopy surrounding typical Mayan sites, Houk explained at the two-day livestreamed NASA and Archaeology From Space symposium.
I found the arguments in Charles Mann's 1491 to be pretty convincing that American populations were much larger than previously thought prior to Columbus' voyage. This seems to be evidence in favor of that thesis.
Other places this technique should be easily applicable are the Amazon basin (which Mann claims hosted a very large population) and likely Cambodia/Angkor Wat.
3 comments:
I'd heard of LIDAR being used from aircraft, but this is the first I've heard of if being used from satellites.
And the Sahara...
Ground penetrating radar was used by the US to map the Nile delta and find hidden ruins and underground aquafers. Of course, this was a way of telling the USSR that we knew where their hidden missile silos were without actually telling the USSR that we knew where their stuff was.
Between LIDAR and Ground Penetrating Radar, the Mayan civilization has been shown to be huge. All those roads and ruins covered by a huge rain forest. Which goes to show that the Mayans basically deforested their areas for farming.
In other words, the 'ancient and primeval' Amazon Rainforest is mostly 600 or so years old. Funny that.
Post a Comment