Lost cities of the Amazon

[gregszybala]

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/lost-cities-of-the-amazon-discovered-from-the-air-180980142/?fbclid=IwAR1hjmK-kPss56RFUEJF-NLmPuBWeGM46dYTq8aMvVjSO8gSWKnIoQH2_S4

[Hal Gorges]

I’m constantly amazed by the size of those cities..Thanks Gregg

[paohrocks]

[clovisoid]

LiDAR is an absolutely astonishing tool. It's kind of shocking what can hide under the jungle . Or how you simply don't notice it because you are literally in the middle of it. (Imagine standing 10 feet from one of the faces on Mount Rushmore, you'd have no perspective of what you are looking at.)

I've seen several large sites in Guatemala in person and the LiDAR maps are amazing. Tikal is one of the largest and densest sites, very well documented and visited by tens of thousands of tourists, locals and researchers over the years. There is a huge citadel (cluster of buildings, no pyramid) that appears to be a copy of the citadel of Teotihuacan in Mexico literally a stones throw from one of the large pyramids structures. And no one ever noticed. You can climb the pyramid, look out over the jungle, it's right there and you never see it.