Lidar locates another lost city: uncovering the Mayan world, if only by accident. From the article:

A huge Maya city has been discovered centuries after it disappeared under jungle canopy in Mexico…. The team discovered three sites in total, in a survey area the size of Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, “by accident” when one archaeologist browsed data on the internet.

“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…. 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. That is more than the number of people who live in the region today, the researchers say….

Lidar technology has revolutionised how archaeologists survey areas covered in vegetation, like the Tropics, opening up a world of lost civilisations, explains Prof [Marcello] Canuto. In the early years of his career, surveys were done by foot and hand, using simple instruments to check the ground inch by inch. But in the decade since Lidar was used in the Mesoamerican region, he says it’s mapped around 10 times the area that archaeologists managed in about a century of work.

For a link to the study, see here.

For other posts on Lidar, see here.