There’s a scientific consensus that the 4th Indiana Jones movie was the worst.
You know what would have made it better?
Lasers.
Hello adventurers, Julian here with DNews.
As interesting as the future is to imagine, discovering the past is also something that
fascinates us.
Our species has such a short memory that we’re always rediscovering who we were just a few
thousand years ago.
But these clues to where we came from and how we’ve changed are tough to come by.
usually it takes months of careful work in remote locations and the progress is slow
going.
This is where LiDAR comes in.
LiDAR is like RADAR except instead of using radio waves reflected off of objects to find
them, it uses lasers, and as it turns out, these lasers are perfect for penetrating dense
vegetation.
LiDAR is speeding up the discovery process.
Last year a team used it to map 140 square miles of what was under cambodian vegetation
in less than two weeks.
Researchers were looking in the vicinity of Angkor Wat, the world’s largest religious
monument that’s been around since the 11 hundreds.
They managed to find an even older city with almost 30 previously forgotten temples, and
because they were so overgrown with vegetation, the temples may be unlooted.
Something similar happened to Tutankhamun; because his grave was missed by looters, it’s
one of the best windows into ancient Egypt we’ve ever found.
Flying lasers around isn’t cheap, it costs about $350 per square kilometer mapped.
But those who use it argue that it’s much cheaper than hiring workers and hacking through
the jungle to discover a site.
The time saving can be immense too.
When researchers used LiDAR in Belize 5 years ago, they found more in a week than they had
in the previous 25 years at the site.
Of course there’s still a need for boots on the ground.
Once you map a site, there’s a lot more digging and studying to be done to understand
it.
In this way LiDAR is just another tool archeologists can use, like a trowel that can see through
trees and is made of lasers.
Still no advances in snake-spotting technologies though.
Archeologists hate snakes.
If you want to keep digging into the past, check out this video Trace made about really
really really old vintages of wine.
I love the idea of being an archeologist.
Traveling, exploring, having a good excuse to carry my trusty whip.
If you could be an archeologist anywhere, where would you go?
Let us know in the comments, and thanks for watching DNews.