Lidar Finds Overgrown Maya Pyramids 169
AlejoHausner writes "A team of archaeologists scanned the jungle of Belize with lidar. Although most of the reflections came from the jungle canopy, some light reflected off the ground surface. Using this, suddenly hidden pyramids, agricultural terraces, and ancient roads are revealed, at 6-inch resolution. The data allowed the archaeologists to bolster their theory that the ancient city of Caracol covered more than 70 square miles of urban sprawl and supported a population of over 115,000."
Cool. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Other uses for this technology (Score:5, Funny)
Or somebody that found your post funny.
Lidar (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Other uses for this technology (Score:2, Funny)
Re:They aren't overgrown (Score:3, Funny)
These pyramids aren't overgrown, they're just big stoned, you insensitive clods.
There, fixed it.
Re:Forensic Anthropology (Score:3, Funny)
Assuming those lost people dug their own shallow grave...
I suspect the poster was thinking living people.
Dead people are easy to find, hell I go a whole park full of em not to far from my house.
You'd be surprised how people hate it when I play Frisbee there.
Re:Cool. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:2012? (Score:3, Funny)
My theory is that 2012 is when all the Mayan computers will crash.
You just know that ~5000 years ago, some Mayan committee somewhere was designing this, and someone said "hey, what happens after year 5335?" and the answer was "who cares? by the time that rolls around, we'll be using something completely different."
It's just like Y2K, except there is nobody around now to fix their code.
Re:Cool. (Score:5, Funny)
The Minoan people of ancient Crete were well on the way to an industrial revolution of of their own that predated that of England by a couple of thousand years. If it wasn't for an inopportune volcanic eruption which completely wiped the Minoans out back around 1400 BCE,
A volcano... or the horrific results of their experimentation with bio-engineering and the creation of a man-bull hybrid?!
Food for thought.
Re:Cool. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Cool. (Score:4, Funny)
Ah, so THEY are the originators of ManBearPig!
Those crazy Minoans, they got exactly what they deserved.
Re:Other uses for this technology (Score:3, Funny)
Why do you think it took so long to decode? The code had no idea what to do.
Re:Other uses for this technology (Score:4, Funny)
I built an irony detector, but it only detects 'everything but irony'.