#Archaeology

Loved the BoingBoing subject for this post: Pew pew! For science! Lasers map ancient Mayan temples… ;-)

Scientists using LIDAR mapped 802 miles of dense jungle-choked terrain around Caracol in Belize… in under four days flying over the area with planes and ground pointing laser radar. Not only that, the laser mapping turned up stuff ground-based surveying had been unable to spot: house mounds, roads and farms.

So freaking cool. NYTimes: Using lasers to map ancient civilization in a matter of days

I love these kind of announcements . Makes me feel like there is so much left to discover in a world that makes you think there’s few unexplored places left.

Written sources from the era—including the Old Testament of the Bible, Greek Homeric epics, and texts from Egyptian pharaoh Ramses III—record the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age as a turbulent period of cultural collapse, famine, and violence.