Airborne LIDAR uncovered exactly 61 000 hidden Maya structures beneath the forest canopy.
Conventional archaeological mapping typically needs 10 years to cover 20‑30 km², whereas LIDAR captured 300 km² of precise data in just six months.
The LIDAR survey was completed in a single day, with subsequent processing taking several months to produce a full 3D map.
I credited Marcello Canuto and Takeshi Inomata for the insights and Steve Snow for the original post, using hashtags like #anthropology and #datascience.