{"id":14109,"date":"2018-02-04T10:46:57","date_gmt":"2018-02-04T16:46:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=14109"},"modified":"2018-02-04T10:46:57","modified_gmt":"2018-02-04T16:46:57","slug":"looking-with-enhanced-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/02\/04\/looking-with-enhanced-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking With Enhanced Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have no doubt that I inherited my interest – passive though it may be – in archaeology from my mother. Not that dad wasn’t interested, but I think mom had the passion for learning the stories behind all the old artifacts, digs, and everything that went with it, starting with the old National Geographics<\/strong><\/em>. So it’s too bad that neither one of them is around to see this report<\/a> on the Maya civilization in WaPo<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Maya civilization that\u00a0was one of the dominant societies\u00a0in Mesoamerica for centuries.<\/p>\n

But the latest discovery \u2014 one archaeologists are calling a \u201cgame changer\u201d \u2014 didn’t even require a can of bug spray.<\/p>\n

Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya: defense works, houses, buildings, industrial-size agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings, announced Thursday, are already reshaping long-held views about the\u00a0size and scope of the Maya civilization.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,\u201d said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on a television special about the new find.\u00a0\u201cAnd what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again,\u201d he\u00a0told the New York Times<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An early result?<\/p>\n

\u201cMost people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,\u201d said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multidisciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. \u201cWith this new data, it\u2019s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there \u2014 including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wow. And what happened to that civilization? It just makes the blood race!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have no doubt that I inherited my interest – passive though it may be – in archaeology from my mother. Not that dad wasn’t interested, but I think mom had the passion for learning the stories behind all the old artifacts, digs, and everything that went with it, starting \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14109"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14109\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14110,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14109\/revisions\/14110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}