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PhD student finds lost city in Mexico jungle by accident (www.bbc.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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“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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (2 children)

How do archaeologists use lidar data? Like is there some software they slap it into and it reveals these hidden signs?

[–] veroxii 6 points 4 days ago

They probably run some algorithms to look for straight lines and right angles to identify man made structure vs natural features.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

Probably looking for different signatures than other surveyors do