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LIDAR technology reveals that, in 700 C.E., the ancient Maya city of Caracol was one of the largest in the world.

Light Detection and Ranging, LIDAR, sees through the jungle to reveal what lies beneath.

LIDAR Technology Helps Uncover a Maya Metropolis

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LIDAR technology reveals that, in 700 C.E., the ancient Maya city of Caracol was one of the largest in the world.

Light Detection and Ranging, LIDAR, sees through the jungle to reveal what lies beneath.

Ancient Worlds

LIDAR Technology Helps Uncover a Maya Metropolis Published: February 8, 2022ARLEN CHASE: This was the first place in the tropics to ever use LIDAR in a broad-scale sense. They’d done little pockets of it here and there, especially in Europe, but no one had ever tried to do a broad scale, to see if you could lift the trees and see what was underneath that forest.NARRATOR: LIDAR, Light Detection and Ranging, was initially used for atmospheric measurements.NARRATOR: LIDAR sends thousands of laser beams of different wavelengths and then measures the time for the reflected beams to return. The lasers were able to penetrate the jungle canopy and create high resolution images of the ground below. The result was a revolution in tropical archeology.JAIME AWE: LIDAR is actually God’s gift to the tropical archaeologist, because you can tell the computer, “Get rid of all the forest. Get rid of all the jungle.” And what you have left is bare earth. And you see the courtyards, you see the temples, you see the palaces, the reservoirs.DIANE CHASE: What some other archaeologists did when they first had access to LIDAR is they used the LIDAR and then they did a ground check. They would be…go and look and see if they saw a feature, and they would say, “Oh, is that on the ground in the place where the LIDAR showed us?”When we did the LIDAR, we were able to double check our maps rather than the other way around.NARRATOR: The years of mapping Caracol by hand finally paid off.DIANE CHASE: We had the ground check first, and then we used the LIDAR.NARRATOR: LIDAR has opened up an incredible window on ancient structures, but also issues around access, to try and keep the data from looters.In Caracol, the LIDAR and the Chases’ maps combined to provide a blueprint for understanding a city-sized bank of LIDAR data.Archaeologist Adrian Chase has spent years modelling the city of Caracol, one hilltop, called a “plazuela,” at a time.ADRIAN CHASE: I started working on the LIDAR at the start of 2010. Using different LIDAR visualizations, I went through the dataset systematically, to try and identify and digitize as many of the plazuela household groups as I could. Each one of these little squares is an extended family household. But all the ridge tops are covered in them.NARRATOR: The computer modelling of the Caracol LIDAR allows us to see an amazing Maya city in precise detail, a city of great size and sophistication.ADRIAN CHASE: The initial map had 78 structures. And then with the LIDAR, we now have over 7,000 household structures that are raised households.NARRATOR: While Europe was in the Dark Ages, the world of the Maya was thriving.ADRIAN CHASE: The population of it estimates about 100,000 people at 700 A.D. Based on, sort of, the rough data that you can get for that time period, it would have made Caracol the seventh largest city in the world. It’s a big city.

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LIDAR Technology Helps Uncover a Maya Metropolis

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Support Provided By

Explore More

Cracking the Maya Code

Ancient Maya Metropolis

Maya: Expert Q&A