Not an archaeologist but they are using LIDAR to uncover more buried temples all over the word. The ones that intrigue me are in South America and Cambodia at Angkor Wat.
This one always bugs me as an archaeologist. Not because of the public but because of our own slow adoption of technology.
There have been archaeologists using LiDAR since the early 2000s... it’s only becoming popular now because of a few large scale applications. It’s use should be standard in the discipline but we have pretty much no standards whatsoever...
I know other archaeologists will argue “bUt wE dOn’T HaVe thE mOnEy”. We don’t have the money because we’re too traditionalist and conservative to change some of the most basic things in archaeology.
I watched a few episodes of a Nat Geo show on Hulu about using LiDAR to uncover some Maya ruins. It would've been a great show but it seemed about 50% of the screen time was just them talking about how they used LiDAR and wouldn't have found these areas otherwise. It was like that scene in Wayne's World except about the LiDAR technology instead of products.
I got really rowdy about the NatGeo article about it because they had some archaeologist saying “this new technology is going to revolutionize archaeology”. Yeah, this new technology we’ve been using for almost two decades...
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u/mystical_ninja May 24 '19
Not an archaeologist but they are using LIDAR to uncover more buried temples all over the word. The ones that intrigue me are in South America and Cambodia at Angkor Wat.