Archaeologists use LiDAR to find lost cities in Honduras

I wasn’t able to talk about this before, but now I guess the cat’s out of the bag. About two years ago, we helped a team of archaeologists and filmmakers to visualize a very large high-resolution aerial LiDAR scan of a chunk of dense Honduran rain forest in the CAVE. Early analyses of the scan had found evidence of ruins hidden under the foliage, and using LiDAR Viewer in the CAVE, we were able to get a closer look. The team recently mounted an expedition, and found untouched remains of not one, but two lost cities in the jungle. Read more about it at National Geographic and The Guardian. I want to say something cool and Indiana Jones-like right now, but I won’t.

Figure 1: A “were-jaguar” effigy, likely representing a combination of a human and spirit animal, is part of a still-buried ceremonial seat, or metate, one of many artifacts discovered in a cache in ruins deep in the Honduran jungle.
Photograph by Dave Yoder, National Geographic. Full-resolution image at National Geographic.

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