
An Ancient City Emerges in a Remote Rain Forest - Thevet
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/an-ancient-city-emerges-in-a-remote-rain-forest
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Pigo
>because these sites were long known to local people, they had invariably been
disturbed, if not badly looted.

No kidding. I had a Spanish teacher in high school from Peru who'd bring in
artifacts he'd found in caves around his home town, his collection included a
human skull he claimed was from an Andean civilization. It didn't dawn on me
until years later how ludicrous it was that this man had kept this skull he'd
found in a cave and then took it across the world to be handled by kids. It
still had dirt inside of it!

Now I wonder how many laws and customs he'd broken, and whether it was a
significant enough find that much was lost by him using it as a trophy.

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derefr
This sort of thing almost justifies the "Indiana Jones" style of archaeology
to me: if you _know_ that the location of a "historical site" of "great
religious significance" just became public knowledge, then the clock is
ticking before a bunch of idiot looters come and break all the walls and vases
looking for gold, or take home random skulls to put on their desks.

So, _presuming_ you're an archaeologist and know how to quickly-and-
efficiently extract and catalogue artifacts without damaging them; and
_presuming_ the country that the site belongs to has no governmental body or
NGO willing to protect the site; then you _may as well_ book the first plane
ticket there, rush in, (carefully) pick up everything of value, box it all up
and ship it to a museum—any museum—where it will be put under glass until the
significance of the artifacts can be understood.

If the locals want their history, _their_ museum can get it back from _your_
museum. Until then, it'll at least be protected from ending up in some
foreigner's Spanish class.

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beloch
Major problem: Context is king in archaeology.

The context of an artifact is its position in the site relative to everything
else, and it's incredibly important. A stone flake by itself tells you a
little, but a stone flake next to a core by a fire with carbonized bones in it
tells you a lot more about the people who lived there. This is why
archaeological digs painstakingly record the position and orientation of
everything they find, in addition to soil features, etc. that might reveal
even more. If you see an artifact in a museum that is from an archaeological
dig, there's a book in an archive somewhere that has a drawing of the level in
which it was found that gives its orientation and position relative to a
datum. You could return to the dig and place the artifact in precisely the
same location that it was found in using this data.

Archaeology is an evolving discipline, and better ways of extracting
additional information from digs with new methods are being found all the
time. For this reason, most major digs do not cover 100% of the site. It's
considered good practice to leave some of the site undisturbed so that future
archaeologists can apply yet-to-be-invented techniques to the site to reveal
more than is presently possible.

So, by scooping up artifacts indiana-jones style, you're destroying a huge
part of the information that they might have revealed. Is it better than
looters digging the place up? Perhaps, but only just barely. It's a highly
destructive, unethical act. It's like justifying a smash-and-grab because
there's a riot going on and you happen to be slightly more needy than most.
There's a small chance that looters won't find the site or that a government
will decide to protect it in time, and it's better to take that chance than it
is to loot the place and ensure the site is destroyed.

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manmal
Is there some kind of 3D radar that scans a few meters below surface level?
Sounds like that would make the job of recording a lot easier.

~~~
beloch
Yes, ground penetrating radar/sonar/magnetic sensing all exist and are used,
but they're not as good as you'd hope. They're mainly used to help figure out
where to dig. There are all sorts of high-tech ways to record the position of
artifacts as they're being dug up, but students and volunteers with pens,
notebooks, and a little training are usually cheaper.

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dzdt
This article badly needs pictures!

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greeneggs
Preston's National Geographic article has pictures:

[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-honduras-l...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/160209-honduras-
lost-city-archaeology-discovery-jaguar-sculptures-photos/)

~~~
desireco42
Thank you, that article badly needed pictures.

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StClaire
More cold water on our image of lost tribes in the rainforest living unchanged
since the dawn of time.

Nearest we can tell, the uncontacted tribes are refugees from great
civilizations who got wiped out by European diseases.

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ivanhoe
Certainly not all of them, but in certain areas it's quite possible that
refugees have been mixing with local population, or even forming new tribes.
New research data all indicates that there were some, for that time, huge
cities (100+K population) in Amazon basin. It makes sense to presume that when
epidemics started at least part of the population managed to escape into
surrounding jungle, leaving those cities empty, similar how in Europe many
cities have been completely deserted in the time of plague. Obviously, we know
so little about this that it's all just a speculation.

~~~
jpatokal
This site is in Honduras, not the Amazon.

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leoc
UC Davis' CAVE VR environment was used to help find the cities in the LIDAR
data: [http://doc-ok.org/?p=1204](http://doc-ok.org/?p=1204) .

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carlmcqueen
Their experience and description of the deep jungle just makes me think of
Predator.

How the article just moved on to how disease wiped out so many people wasn't
new news to me making me feel like the reality that it was so hard to navigate
the city meant they didn't have a lot of content to write about from their
nine days in the scariest point of jungle I've ever heard of.

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desireco42
So, here is what I don't understand, why did they have to disturb it so much?
Western Europeans did a lot of damage and being more careful would be very
helpful.

Unless they were concerned about looters.

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Mz
Related:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296058](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13296058)

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cowardlydragon
HOLY SHIT.

So the spaniards were slaving people into plantations, where they'd die at a
90% rate from European disease, and then just round up more people for direct
exposure?

That is worse than a concentration camp.

