Lidar works by beaming a laser from a hand-held scanner from an airplane or up-close. The technology creates a virtual 3D map of the area, omitting the vegetation and leaving only the topography of the area. “There are entire cities we didn’t know about now showing up in the survey data,” said archaeologist Francisco Estrada-Belli, one of the leading scientists with the Foundation for Maya Cultural and Natural Heritage (Pacunam) which launched the project.
The new data also found thousands of residential homes, which helped scientists understand that the population of the territory was 11 million, nine million more than previously estimated. This puts the Maya on the same level as ancient Egyptian and ancient Chinese civilizations, both in terms of their population and level of advancement.
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