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Lidar helps uncover an ancient, kilometer-long Mayan structure – TechCrunch:
Lidar is fast becoming one of the most influential tools in archaeology, revealing things in a few hours what might have taken months of machete wielding and manual measurements otherwise. The latest such discovery is an enormous Mayan structure, more than a kilometer long, 3,000 years old, and seemingly used for astronomical observations.
Takeshi Inomata of the University of Arizona is the lead author of the paper describing the monumental artificial plateau, published in the journal Nature. This unprecedented structure — by far the largest and oldest of its type — may remind you of another such discovery, the "Mayan megalopolis" found in Guatemala two years ago.
[...] Such huge structures, groups of foundations, and other evidence of human activity may strike you as obvious. But when you're on the ground they're not nearly as obvious as you'd think — usually because they're covered by both a canopy of trees and thick undergrowth.
"I have spent thousands of hours of fieldwork walking behind a local machete-wielding man who would cut straight lines through the forest," wrote anthropologist Patricia McAnany, who was not involved in the research, for an commentary that also appeared in Nature. "This time-consuming process has required years, often decades, of fieldwork to map a large ancient Maya city such as Tikal in Guatemala and Caracol in Belize."
[...] What emerged was an enormous ceremonial center now called Aguada Fénix, the largest feature of which is an artificial plateau more than 10 meters tall and 1.4 kilometers in length. It is theorized that these huge plateaus, of which Aguada Fénix is the oldest and largest, were used to track the movement of the sun through the seasons and perform various rites.
Journal Reference:
Takeshi Inomata, Daniela Triadan, Verónica A. Vázquez López, et al. Monumental architecture at Aguada F├⌐nix and the rise of Maya civilization, Nature (DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2343-4)
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @11:11AM (3 children)
>> "I have spent thousands of hours of fieldwork walking behind a local machete-wielding man who would cut straight lines through the forest," wrote anthropologist Patricia McAnany.
Why didn't she hire a machete-wielding woman, transvestite, or one of the 92 other genders?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @07:12PM
They probably don't make those in rural Guatemala.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @09:36PM
1) Naming past workers "men", who presented as men, isn't being sexist any more than calling Winston Churchill a man is sexist. These aren't hypothetical workers, but concrete people the author interacted with in the past. If there had been women among them, the author could (should!) have said so. Not saying so implies basically nothing about anything except who this person was able to find to hire to cut paths.
2) if you think that transvestite is a gender, you're alone in that. Did you mean transsexual? If so, transsexual is also not a gender, and there's no way to know if a man swinging a machete in front of me is trans or cis, unless we take a piss together, or get more intimate.
IDK why you thought it was a good idea to post that. Your mind is not clear. You should sit down, shut up, and read or listen or otherwise research, instead of trying to participate in this conversation. You're like the 3yo who tries to help cook, sees bits going into the compost, and throws the diced veg into the compost. It's awkward to watch and wastes time and resources.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 07 2020, @11:23PM
They tried hiring some blind guy but it just didn't work out.