Are These the First Ever Pictures of Honduras's Lost Ciudad Blanca?
Explorers have been searching on foot for Honduras's mythical city for generations. Now, they seem to have found it from a tiny Cessna airplane, aided by million-dollar technology.
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"This whole adventure for the last couple years has been quite a wild ride," the expedition's leader Steve Elkins told me on the phone from Cancun. "There were times I felt like if I didn't find anything, everybody would say, 'What a fool you are. You spent all this money, all this effort. There's nothing there.'" But maybe, just maybe, they would get lucky, and the LIDAR would see something -- walls, pyramids, symmetry, straight lines of any kind -- that was at odds with the natural contours of the jungle floor. Something, maybe, like this, the first ever visual confirmation of a lost civilization in the Mosquitia forest:
The New Yorker's Douglas Preston was lucky enough (and brave enough) to be on board during one of these mapping flights, over an area designated Target One (and referred to colloquially as T1), a valley where Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists had noticed unnatural features in satellite data more than a decade ago. "But," Preston writes in his May 6 New Yorker piece (*really* worth reading in full if you have access), "the images were blurry and ambiguous, and no ground expedition had been able to reach T1." Elkins, who is a documentary filmmaker, told Preston, "There's no record of anybody ever being in T1." He continued, "Even the expeditions in the 1930s and '40s went around it, because it was too hard."
But LIDAR technology opens new possibilities for archaeologists. Jungle that was once impenetrable from below is now legible from above. The scale and speed of LIDAR-enabled research dwarfs older techniques.
"This technology is going to revolutionize archaeology," archeologist Christopher Fisher of Colorado State University told me, also from Cancun. "We used to have to walk through the jungle, hacking our way through, recording every architectural feature, every trace of ancient habitation that we used to find. Incredibly labor intensive."
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/are-these-the-first-ever-pictures-of-hondurass-lost-ciudad-blanca/275877/
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