Deep in the southern forest of Campeche, a Mexican port city, archeologists have discovered the remains of temple pyramids, residential patios, a ballcourt, and a reservoir—remains that are indicative of an ancient Mayan city. While the classic period of the Mayans was 250–900 AD, the technology used to reveal the urbanization of the past—Lidar—is less than a century old, first coming into use in the 1960s.
Named after a fresh water lagoon, the lost city “Valeriana” was discovered with the help of Lidar, or Light Detection and Ranging, a technology that uses lasers to scan hidden structures and analyze archaeological landscapes. Ph.D. student Luke Auld-Thomas made the discovery after looking at decade-old aerial scans that were captured by ecologists for another unrelated project in the Mexican forest.
"The area they had mapped with absolutely no interest in finding archaeological sites at all was really archaeologically important. One of their survey blocks, intended just to map trees, had actually mapped trees growing on top of a really large Mayan city that was previously unknown to the scientific community. It's like a 15-minute walk off the highway," Auld-Thomas told Wired magazine.
The findings revealed a treasure trove of the past: 6,764 city structures, including multiple enclosed plazas connected by a broad causeway; a reservoir formed by damming an arroyo (a seasonal watercourse); and a probable E-Group assemblage, an architectural arrangement that generally indicates a founding date prior to AD 150.
“If you could design for a video game all of the classic features of a Mayan city, they would look like this,” Auld-Thomas told the NY Times.
Researchers published the findings in Cambridge University Press, noting that the discovery of Valeriana highlights the fact that there are still major gaps in their knowledge of the existence or absence of large sites within as-yet unmapped areas of the Mayan Lowland.
As archeological unearthing continues, standards help dig up archeological finds. One such standard, INCITS/ISO 19115-2:2009[R2014], Geographic information - Metadata - Part 2: Extensions for imagery and gridded data, is a standard that defines the schema required for describing imagery and gridded data, giving information on the equipment used to acquire data, the geometry of the measuring process employed by the equipment, and the production process used to digitize the raw data. This American National Standard (ANS) was developed by the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS), a member and accredited standards developer of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
In recent years, archaeologists have turned to deep learning to unearth amazing archeological finds, also supported by standards, which includes IEC 62243, Artificial Intelligence Exchange and Service Tie to All Test Environments (AI-ESTATE), developed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) Technical Committee (TC) 91, Electronics assembly technology. IPC administers the U.S. National Committee (USNC)-approved Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to IEC TC 91.
A standard that supports Lidar technology, ISO 28902-3:2018, Air quality - Environmental meteorology - Part 3: Ground-based remote sensing of wind by continuous-wave Doppler lidar, was developed by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) TC 146, Air quality, Subcommittee (SC) 5, Meteorology. The standard specifies the requirements and performance test procedures for monostatic heterodyne continuous-wave (CW) Doppler lidar techniques, and presents their advantages and limitations. ASTM International is the ANSI-accredited U.S. TAG administrator to ISO TC 146 and SC 5.
As standards keep pace with innovation, archeology’s technological renaissance will continue to unlock scenes from the past, giving us access to the buried traces of bygone civilizations. What society will we unearth next?