Finding ruins of ancient civilisations is painful and hard. You have to head to a location and trudge the earth – explore dense rainforests, deserts, high altitude mountains and even dive under the ocean – all for the quest to find that one undiscovered historical site. Once a site is discovered, you spend years carefully digging it with shovels, trowels, brushes and chiselers to bring out bits and pieces of ancient civilisation and figure how those people lived.
But now, a new suite of technologies has given rather cool superpowers to these dust-laden archaeologists. And a new way of looking at the past. Other than shovels, modern archaeologists pack laser rangefinders, magnetometers, computers for satellite mapping and creating 3D models and digital twins and drones with LiDAR.
It was while birdwatching in Tikal National Park in Guatemala that I come across LiDAR or Light Detection and Ranging as a technology. Tikal is a ruin of an ancient Mayan city, inside a rainforest, making it a unique location for archaeologists and birdwatchers alike (chosen well by George Lucas who filmed an action sequence for the first Star Wars film here to show an alien planet).
From around 2000 BCE to 1000 CE, the Mayans built temples and pyramids and cities all over modern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador. After their civilisation fell, these cities were hidden under dense rainforests making their discovery cumbersome and expensive.
That changed with LiDAR, a technology that uses a laser light carried by a drone. The drone flies over these forests, transmits rapid pules of infrared down into the dense canopy. These lights penetrate canopies, and when they hit solid things (like walls), reflect back up.
The reflected light is captured by a system receiver to develop a 3D map of the objects lying under the forest bed or made invisible by dense canopy. Once a digital map is with an archaeologist, they can instruct their AI-driven program to remove the jungle and show contours of any ruins found in the area.
This technique has been revolutionary in mapping not only Mayan pyramids, but other hard to access locations – all in the last couple of years. Last year, LiDAR technology helped Uzbekistan archaeologists map out and detail one of the largest medieval cities along the Silk Road trade route in its hard-to-reach high altitude mountain range. The detailed maps revealed 300 structures including watchtowers, defensive walls, corridors and a central fortress.
On an Indonesian island, scientists discovered cave art that’s at least 51000 years old – the oldest discovered till date. Robots using LiDAR helped scientists discover a Canaanite shipwreck from 300 years ago off the coast of Israel. Folks in Switzerland discovered a Roman military camp, 7000 feet high in the Swiss Alps. In the Netherlands, a citizen science project used LiDAR to uncover nearly 3,000 previously unknown burial mounds, Celtic fields, cart tracks and other cultural heritage features hidden under vegetation. In Honduras, a Mesoamerican archeological team found the long-lost site of La Ciudad Dianca (The White City), a Mesoamerican settlement believed to be located within a dense tropical rainforest called La Mosquitia. The most striking discovery there was the head of a ‘were-jaguar’ possibly depicting a shaman in a transformed state.
Submarine mapping is another technology that has fished history from deep waters. The wreck of Ernest Shackleton’s Irish ship which raced to reach the South Pole around 1915, was recently discovered at the bottom of the sea floor, near Antarctica. The mapping was done by underwater robots belonging to Deep Ocean Search and Voyis Imaging, which stitched 25000 high resolution photos to create a digital twin – a dynamic 3D recreation of a physical object, mirroring its real-world counterpart. This twin can also be updated real-time as more data is collected from the shipwreck.
Technology not only aids discovery but also changes the retelling of it. A documentary by National Geographic, about the Shackleton shipwreck, used AI-recreated voices of Shackleton and his team – who miraculously escaped the sinking – narrating their experience of the failed expedition taken from Shackleton’s diary.
AI is also being used in other ways to dig deeper into our history. A few weeks ago, researchers at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi ran a machine-learning algorithm on top of high-resolution data from radars in deserts to find the Sarug Al-Hadid site, which shows 5000 years of human activity. When a team deployed an AI system on new areas around Nazca lines, they discovered 303 new figurative geoglyphs in six months. (It took nearly a century to discover the 430 Nazca lines known before this.)
Last year, a 21-year-old computer science major won a $40,000 award for developing an AI program that successfully read Greek letters written inside an unopened, damaged and burnt Roman scroll from Pompeii in AD 79. He became the first person in nearly 2000 years to read a part of the Herculaneum scroll.
Interdisciplinary science has specially shown fascinating potential. DNA analysis of a strange substance around mummies found in tombs in northwestern China, was revealed to be kefir, a soft type of cheese. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is sending beams of X-rays through fragments of Roman concrete to figure out what the Romans used in the Pantheon and why that structure is standing 2000 years later.
Modern archaeologists are armed with tools to see into our collective past. There’s ground-penetrating radar (GPR), which uses robots to send radar pulses to figure out what lies under ground. Magnetometry allows archaeologists to map anomalies in the earth’s magnetic field to identify the presence or absence of near surface structures and artifacts, under the ground.
The rate of discovery, of understanding of our ancients, is staggering. Nothing this cool has happened to archaeology technology, except maybe radiocarbon dating, a method invented in 1940s. But why is there such a rush to find these sites? Or to understand our history? Perhaps because for archaeologists, it’s a race against time. Rapid urbanisation, climate erosion and deforestation continue to remove traces of history from our lands. Digital technology helps accelerate the process of discovery and protect archaeological heritage. But will it help us do something different in our modern lives? That remains to be seen.
Shweta Taneja is an author and journalist based in the Bay Area. Her fortnightly column will reflect on how emerging tech and science are reshaping society in Silicon Valley and beyond. Find her online with @shwetawrites. The views expressed are personal.
