And Mr Scherer’s team stumbled on this discovery accidentally, having originally intended to use the lidar scans for finding more about the infrastructure of a somewhat understudied region ...

New lidar research shows the Maya civilization peaked at 16 million people, revealing dense cities and vast rural networks.

Mayan mystery: Archaeologist discovers 1,000-year-old cave He added: "LiDAR is revolutionising archaeology the way the Hubble Space Telescope revolutionised astronomy.

In a way, the structures were hiding in plain sight. "As soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish," said Canuto said of the LiDAR images, "because these were things that we had been ...

A large-scale, low-resolution lidar scan of the area produced some leads, and smaller areas were then scanned at higher resolution, producing the images you see here.

The lidar imagery revealed, for example, lots of low linear features that could be man-made or natural. It’s not always easy to tell the difference, but context and existing scholarship fill in ...

Lidar is best known as the technology that enables self-driving cars to make sense of the world (and lately as the scanning tech that showed up in this year’s iPad Pro refresh).

Mr Auld-Thomas analysed data from one such lidar project from 2013, focused on measuring and monitoring carbon in Mexico’s forests, to see what lay underneath 50 square miles of Campeche.

The LiDAR scans revealed more than 60,000 previously unknown structures in the area, running the gamut from houses, walls and roadways, to huge pyramids and palaces.

A Maya site discovered by Takeshi Inomata, as it appears in a low-resolution lidar map (left) and high-resolution scan (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía/National Centre for Airborne ...

The extent of one of the Mayan ceremonial centres — complete with several step pyramids — is shown in this 3D LiDAR scan image. Picture: National Geographic/The Lost Maya City MAYAN REVELATIONS ...

The LiDAR initiative is being led by the PACUNAM Foundation, a Guatemalan nonprofit that seeks to further research and preservation efforts in the region. And the search for Mayan ruins is far ...