How to find Mayan ruins while sitting at your laptop

[Judi Lynn]

January 31, 2019 by Laura Castañón, Northeastern University

In the summer of 2014, Matthew Cardona was standing in a shed near his father's childhood home in Guatemala. The walls were lined with boxes and buckets filled with recently unearthed Mayan artifacts. He was shown intricate pottery and obsidian masks and knives. The items were being packed up and moved off site.

"I was kind of nervous," Cardona said. "I never knew where they got it from, but I knew it came from the surrounding valley."

Cardona, now a master's student in geospatial services at Northeastern, was able to investigate the origin of these artifacts as part of a class on remote sensing for archaeology in the spring of 2018. Looking through satellite images on his laptop, he started noticing unusual shapes in the landscape that he believed to be undiscovered Mayan ruins near his extended family's farm in southeastern Guatemala.

"I started realizing these hills, they didn't look natural," Cardona said. "They looked like they were put there by somebody."

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-01-mayan-laptop.html#jCp