Pyramid structure discovered near Caral Peru
7 comments
·February 1, 2025timmg
Have there been any recent books that try to reconstruct what pre-Columbian South America was like?
I know that 1491 was a pretty good book about this. But it's like 20 years old now. And Lidar seems to have really opened up new insights in the past decade or so.
thrownblown
Not South America, but the story of Moncacht-Apé (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moncacht-Ap%C3%A9) is a fascinating—if slightly dubious—primary source describing his journey across North America immediately prior to European contact. I found a copy of his account as told to a French colonial officer on Amazon, and it looked like it was printed on a laser printer.
Cabeza de Vaca spent 1528–1536 wandering through the Southwest, living with multiple indigenous tribes. His experiences ranged from enslavement to becoming a medicine man. His firsthand account, Naufragios, is available, but I highly recommend A Land So Strange by Andrés Reséndez for a more accessible read. De Vaca also had a second adventure in South America, but it’s not as well-documented.
Another great read is River of Darkness by Buddy Levy, which covers Francisco Orellana’s journey down the Amazon. His expedition was roughly contemporary to Cabeza de Vaca’s own jungle survival story—though Orellana was a bit more conquistadorial than De Vaca.
I’d also love to see a proper follow-up to 1491 (1493 doesn’t count!). The closest thing we have might be America Before by Graham Hancock, which incorporates recent LiDAR discoveries—but it leans more into speculation than hard archaeology.
bboygravity
If you mean visually, there's this: https://tenochtitlan.thomaskole.nl/
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folli
Has anyone worked on AI/ML approaches for detecting ancient structures in LiDAR data? Given that training data for identifying remnants of man-made structures (e.g., Roman or medieval ruins) is quite sparse, how would you approach this problem?
Some initial thoughts:
- Data Augmentation: Using synthetic or simulated LiDAR data from known structures to improve training. - Few-Shot Learning / Transfer Learning: Training models on better-documented archaeological sites and applying them to new areas.
Would love to hear thoughts from people with experience in remote sensing, computer vision, or archaeology!
archaeoscape
We work on exactly that, in application to ancient Khmer civilization (9th to 15th century). In fact, data is not that sparse, but it's hard to get it. Archaeologists just don't share data as much.
The basic answer is that you have to have at least some data to be able to do anything. We found that in the data regime augmentation works a little bit, transfer learning much less so. What really works is simply sitting down and annotating the data, with on-the-ground surveys and follows ups.
There is so much to discover in that region. On a geology class field trip, a few hours south of Lima, our instructor stopped and pointed out a mound that would not have caught my eye at all. Then he explained how it makes no sense for a geological feature like that to be there.
It was a covered structure. A Huaca. Lima has quite a few in the middle of the city. A stark reminder that we’ve been there ,intermittently, for millennia.