Laser Takes 4 Days to Do 25 Years of Archaeology

Archaeologist couple use laser technology to keep up with the Indiana Joneses.

A new archaeological mapping technology has made a breakthrough in the dense forests of Caracol, Belize, effectively capturing images of an ancient Mayan city in just four days, a task which previously would have taken 25 years.

3D imaging of archaeological sites has improved dramatically over the last few years, but the technology has always been limited by how dense the vegetation is surrounding the site. Imaging radar and multispectral surveys taken either from aircraft or from NASA satellites are limited in their abilities in much of Central America because of the impenetrable canopy of the rain forest.

This created a problem, reducing anthropological archaeology couple Dr Arlen Chase and Dr Diane Chase to the heavy graft of hacking through the tropical jungle on foot and mapping everything meticulously by hand. The couple took a chance on a new technology which fires lasers from an aircraft and were astounded when the results came back with clear topographical imaging which could see through the dense vegetation.

The light detection and ranging (lidar) system was able to effectively map the whole Mayan ruins in a matter of four short days, a task which would have taken a quarter of a century for the archaeological team individually. Dr Diane Chase told The New York Times: “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and 90s”

Her husband, Dr Arlen Chase commented: “Now we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape. We know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.”