@BaqTalk
Been working in Lidar for over a decade, and had the privilege of calibrating data that contained a pyramid. (But that was not the goal of the operation). When we got in touch with the nearby university, we assumed they already knew of it, but it was new to them, and allowed them to obtain funding to send a ground-team.
@mck8691
Great video, as someone who works in the field. One thing to note is that LiDAR returns are not just looking at the z value or time for signal return. The strength of the signal return is also a factor and can help describe what surface was struck; hard surfaces will return stronger singals that say vegetation, or non compacted earth.
@adef
This is quickly becoming the best education channel on YouTube. Please keep it up!!
@Draconicrose
This is really cool science! I like that it's a pretty non-invasive technique. Archeologists can then go in with more precision and only disturb the part of the forest they need to. Also shout out to the animators for making those animal illustrations come to life!
@dewah95
You all explain things in such a digestible way. What an awesome explanation of LiDAR.
@GalactoseGalaxy
This feels like the tv shows i grew up on and gave me a sense of wonder about the world. Thank you for picking up the torch
@Conaman0
The quality of research at Howtown is insane. Utterly mesmerizing information. How do you guys keep getting better each video???
@paperclipman123
The thumbnail alone should make this a trending video. That's a true work of art.
@BridgeDoge-ih7lq
Her voice is just made for narration
@calinsaner
My mom is from Guatemala but was raised from 5 years old in LA. I myself have never been to this beautiful breath taking country. Seeing this makes me want to learn more about my roots.
@talitek
They've been doing this in the Amazon too. We're discovering whole civilisations we never knew existed!
@datdam-y8y
LIDAR is one of those things that keeps on giving year by year. One thing about it that's so uniquely fitting for the Mesoamerican archeology is that how most undiscovered sites there sit under a dense foliage, with little or no ground access, and how most surviving brickwork essentially looks like hills to common folks. And this is a method that's being replicated all over the world, I remember when they discovered Mahendraparvata (the 2nd capital of the Khmer empire iirc) in the hills northeast of Angkor with this same method back in 2012/13
@NicoMiniNico
The visual, the animations, and solid content all make this precious. This reminds me why I like YouTube at the first place. Thank you for doing this work, I'll stay tuned for more.
@lankyalpaca
oh god im an urban designer and that 'classical maya urbanism' paper got me excited like a kid lmao
@ahuman7543
I have an assesment on Lidar now I have a bunch of papers to read thanks Howtown.
@arglebarf
I worked on a project using GPS and lidar in high precision mapping for forestry. The easiest way to get the ground surface is through a process called cloth simulation. You take your point cloud and flip it upside down. Then you calculate how a cloth would drape over the point cloud (with the ground return being the highest in your flipped point cloud). The stiffness of the "cloth" gets tuned based on the separation between points, so that it isn't too much of a catenary (sagging material).
@crdam4429
I've been interested in Lidar for as long as I can remember knowing about it, but was always confused about the forest canopy impact. This is an absolute bullseye episode, a million lidar pulses of thanks to you all! (I know that's only 2s but hey)
@MajoraZ
Great video! One of the Tikal LIDAR researchers shared it around, hence me finding it! I do posts on Mesoamerica and consulting on the topic for history/archeology channels, so i wanted to give a few minor clarifications/corrections: Regarding 1:01, it's actually pretty typical in Mesoamerica for the biggest cities and areas of urbanization to be far inland rather then on the coasts, it's not just a Maya thing: This was true of Teotihuacan (the far off city mentioned at 13:04, it's relationship with and possible conquest of Maya cities is super cool!), Cholula (home to the world's largest Pyramid), Tula (allegedly the capital of the Toltecs, who probably didn't actually exist), Tzintzuntzan (the capital of the underrated Purepecha Empire, the third largest in the Americas at European contact after the Inca and Aztec), the primate Zapotec city of Monte Alban, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, and much more. Most of these (including all the specific examples I gave) WERE in highland valleys and hills rather then the lowlands, unlike Tikal and many other large Classic Maya cities, but I think that speaks more to just the fact that most of Mesoamerica outside of the Maya regions ARE highlands, rather then the Maya necessarily uniquely choosing to urbanize lowland regions (for example, the Olmec and other cultures in Southern Veracruz also built cities in the lowlands, though perhaps these count as coastal?) What IS a notable difference is that today, those highland and inland cities (or the Spanish colonial ones built over them) and regions remain the larges and most populated in Mexico, wheras in the Maya regions, the central lowlands aren't a major population center or hub of large cities, which as you mention, are rather in the southern highlands or along the coasts. That, I believe, is rather because of of the Classic Maya Collapse described at 2:20, which left much of those lowland urban centers abandoned and the subregion relatively depopulated, and as a result, colonial Spanish and then Mexican, Guatemlan, etc settlements and population growth was focused elsewhere, whereas to the west, they were taking over or building over existing inland major cities that were still inhabited at the time of contact, and those remained the largest urban centers to today (for example, re: 2:55, Mexico city was built over the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the lakes it was in the middle of were drained, so modern day Mexico City sprawls over the former lakebed and shorelines, and absorbed the modernized towns and cities of what used to be other Aztec cities nearby) That being said, the Classic Maya Collapse didn't lead to the decline of all major Maya cities, and certainly didn't cause the Maya to vanish, as some more sensationalist reporting sometimes claims: The Central and Southern Maya Lowlands had most of it's cities gradually decline and become abandoned, but smaller settlements continued to exist, and cities in other subregions of the Maya civilization, such as to the north in Yucatan, actually grew in the aftermath: Chichen Itza is one of the most famous Maya cities (albeit most people use use the name to refer to a specific structure there, the Temple of Kulkulcan/El Castillo) and it's heyday was in the Early Postclassic period, for example, and perhaps the largest Maya political network to exist, the League of Mayapan formed in the Early Postclassic as well and only fractured around 1450. By the time of Spanish contact, there certainly weren't any Maya cities the size of Tikal, but Cortes reported that the Maya cities of Potonchan was sizable, and in fact the last Maya kingdoms only fell to the Spanish in 1697, over 200 years after Europeans first arrived in the Americas and even after the founding of the 13 US colonies! Today there's still 7-10 million Maya people around, and much of them still speak Maya languages (there are individual Maya and other Mesoamerican languages that still have more speakers alone today than every Indigenous language from the US combined!) Lastly, and most tangentially, regarding 4:24, that there was more known about the Aztec at the time in the late 19th century... I guess that's true, by virtue of the Maya sort of only first being rediscovered by European/American archeologists at the time, but I think it's worth clarifying that much wasn't known and had been forgotten about the Aztec and other civilizations as well. A lot of people are under the impression that not much about Mesoamerican history or culture survives today, and while in a sense that is true (since the Spanish likely burned thousands, if not tens of thousands of Mesoamerican books and documents, demolished temples, destroyed art, and wiped out other customs and practices), there was actually also a lot re-recorded in the early colonial period, especially on the Aztec: Perhaps a few hundred documents were written in the 16th and 17th centuries either by Mesoamerican nobles and/or Spanish friars, some of it quite detailed, but much of these were lost or suppressed. Over time, accounts and visual depictions, and by extension popular imagination of Mesoamerica, fell in the hands of authors who hadn't actually been to Mexico, seen Mesoamerican cities and art, and were only working off of a limited number of secondhand sources. The actual fashion and architecture of say the Aztec (whose men wore mantles sort of like greek/roman togas, woman with tied hair buns/knots, long blouses and painted faces like Japanese geisha, with floral and avian designs on their clothing, fine jewelry, and soldiers who wore thick padded armor covered in mosaics of iridescent feathers; with Aztec palaces and other structures resembling the Minoan palaces at Knossos with flat square shapes, patios with columns and painted frescos: Check out art by Scott and Stuart Gentling, Daniel Parada aka Zotzcomic or Kamazotz, Rafael Mena etc for good reconstructions!) over time got blended with those of tribes from Brazil, leading to visual sterotypes of Mesoamerican civilizations as being mostly naked, with big headdresses, and which exaggerated them as being barbaric or primitive, contrary to actual accounts written earlier, where Conquistadors and Spanish friars tended to, while still having their own biases and exaggerating certain things, described Mesoamerican society, fashion, architecture, culture, etc with more authencity and praised their cities, art, social order etc very frequently. It was only around the same time or a few decades earlier in the late 19th century, or even later, in early and mid 20th century, that a lot of earlier and more detailed accounts and sources on Aztec (and other Mesoamerican culture's) history and culture, such as the Duran Codex, was rediscovered or made widely available (such as for the Florentine Codex), let alone translated: Even today a HUGE amount of the primary sources used in Mesoamerican studies lack English or even Spanish translations, and some aren't digitized at all (though both the examples I just gave are some of the most important works and both have accessible English translations, the Florentine Codex is even available for free via a searchable Getty site). In a way, Mesoamerican studies is a field that's really less then a century old in many areas, and as a result the state of research and findings change rapidly: What most people learn about the topic in schools (read; basically nothing) is woefully out of date and insufficient, and a lot more needs to be done to change that and to make things more accessible: I would wager at least part of why schools don't teach much about Mesoamerican history and archeology is that almost all our sources or translations of them are still under Copyright, wheras important works from European, Near Eastern, or Asian history have transcriptions and translations that have been around for centuries. To loop back to LIDAR, I really wish and hope that is more is done to make the data from LIDAR scans, and the resulting visualizations, maps, etc produced from it, accessible to the public at large. For better or worse, most people get more interested in historical cultures if you show them cool images of giant cities and pretty architecture, and maps, artistic reconstructions, and other things made with LIDAR data or the data itself being widely available and free to republish and reuse via CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA licenses, would be a huge boon to improving public interest in Mesoamerica. Even as somebody who actively reads published literature on Mesoamerica, it can be hard to find visualizations, let alone ones with usable liscenses, and I think this is something the field should really strive for, especially also doing outreach with educators on Youtube and other social media platforms: Videos like this are a great step towards that!
@LOSANA-d8e
The thumbnail alone should make this a trending video. That's a true work of art.
@Howtown