Laser tech reveals ancient settlement

Not far from the Guatemalan sites that tourists already know, like the towering temples of the ancient city of Tikal, laser technology has uncovered about 60,000 homes, palaces, tombs and even highways in the humid lowlands.

The findings suggested an ancient society of such density and interconnectedness that even the most experienced archaeologists were surprised.

“Everywhere that we looked, there was more settlement than we expected,” said Thomas Garrison, a National Geographic explorer and archaeologist at Ithaca College.

Researchers found the structures by shooting lasers from planes to pierce the thick foliage and paint a 3-D picture of the ground below. The technology is called Light Detection and Ranging, or lidar.

The method has been used elsewhere, including around the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia. But the effort in Guatemala is the largest such project ever undertaken. More than 800 square miles of the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala’s Peten region have been mapped, according to a report by National Geographic, which is airing a television special about the project Tuesday.

“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on the television special. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand-new again.”