Lidar Helps Uncover an Ancient, Kilometer-Long Mayan Structure
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Lidar helps uncover an ancient, kilometer-long Mayan structure - TechCrunch:
Lidar is fast becoming one of the most influential tools in archaeology, revealing things in a few hours what might have taken months of machete wielding and manual measurements otherwise. The latest such discovery is an enormous Mayan structure, more than a kilometer long, 3,000 years old, and seemingly used for astronomical observations.
Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona is the lead author of the paper describing the monumental artificial plateau, published in the journal Nature. This unprecedented structure - by far the largest and oldest of its type - may remind you of another such discovery, the "Mayan megalopolis" found in Guatemala two years ago.
[...] Such huge structures, groups of foundations, and other evidence of human activity may strike you as obvious. But when you're on the ground they're not nearly as obvious as you'd think - usually because they're covered by both a canopy of trees and thick undergrowth.
"I have spent thousands of hours of fieldwork walking behind a local machete-wielding man who would cut straight lines through the forest," wrote anthropologist Patricia McAnany, who was not involved in the research, for an commentary that also appeared in Nature. "This time-consuming process has required years, often decades, of fieldwork to map a large ancient Maya city such as Tikal in Guatemala and Caracol in Belize."
[...] What emerged was an enormous ceremonial center now called Aguada Fenix, the largest feature of which is an artificial plateau more than 10 meters tall and 1.4 kilometers in length. It is theorized that these huge plateaus, of which Aguada Fenix is the oldest and largest, were used to track the movement of the sun through the seasons and perform various rites.
Journal Reference:
Takeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, Veronica A. Vazquez Lopez, et al. Monumental architecture at Aguada Fnix and the rise of Maya civilization, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4)
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