In 2021: Thousands of 'ghosts' appear in radar images, invisible to the naked eye

The past 2021 has marked a series of interesting archaeological discoveries that modern remote sensing means can see through the jungle and the ground, making them appear like ghosts.

1. Magnificent "Aquarium" in Venice

LiDAR reveals clusters of structures on the bottom of the Venice lagoon

Besides the beautiful old city we see, the Venice lagoon area hides another incredible city, 2,000 years old, built by the Romans.

Research led by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ISMAR) in Venice, published in Scientific Reports, shows that beneath the lagoon is a large city with a beautiful main paved road, flanked by a series of houses and houses. life service projects. The city has both a large commercial center and a harbor as big as a basketball court.

2. "Miniature Citadel" hidden in the hill

LiDAR image shows mysterious architectural cluster

A hill in Tikal - the capital of the Maya empire and now a popular tourist destination in Guatemala today - turned out to be no natural hill. LiDAR remote sensing technology has found that inside the "hill" is a cluster of structures like palaces and temples Teotihuacan is another empire as strong as Maya with a city not far from Tikal. It seems that these two cities have a good relationship and have set up a kind of "embassy" on each other's land.

3. Survey to dig ditches, treasures, ancient Viking boat graves. appear one after another

The black structures are not visible to the naked eye, but are "ghosts" revealed by ground-penetrating radar

The discovery was announced in November, revealing a series of ancient tombs of the Viking nobility in Gjellestad, Østfold, Southern Norway.

According to the Norwegian Institute of Cultural Heritage, the area where a resident intends to dig a ditch contains many large boat graves, inside each grave are many lavish burial items because this is the burial method for aristocrats. leading in Viking society. Besides the tombs, there are ruins of longhouses, suggesting that this may have been an ancient administrative center.

Previously, because this was an area with many archaeological finds, the authorities used ground-penetrating radar to check before allowing trenching work to begin.

4. Hundreds of Maya "ghosts" in Mexico

Spectacular LiDAR image showing some of the structures in the 85,000km2 . dynamic range of structures

A team of scientists led by anthropologist Takeshi Inomata from the University of Arizona used LiDAR to find a religious complex that spans an area of ​​up to 85,000 square kilometers in Tabasco and Veracruz, Mexico.

The structures are clearly Mayan, but bear the mark of the ancient Olmec city of San Lorenzo, dating to about 1150 BC, suggesting that the two civilizations once intertwined complicated.

These structures belong to a series of Maya cities and towns that were built as the empire expanded in South America. The study was published late October 2021 in Nature Human Behavior.