May 18, 2010

For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

Even the new remote-sensing technologies, so effective in recent decades at surveying other archaeological sites, were no help. Imaging radar and multispectral surveys by air and from space could not “see” through the trees.
Then, in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cover and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.
In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.
“We were blown away,” Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. “We believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and ’90s.”
The Chases, who are professors of anthropology at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, had determined from earlier surveys that Caracol extended over a wide area in its heyday, between A.D. 550 and 900. From a ceremonial center of palaces and broad plazas, it stretched out to industrial zones and poor neighborhoods and beyond to suburbs of substantial houses, markets and terraced fields and reservoirs.
This picture of urban sprawl led the Chases to estimate the city’s population at its peak at more than 115,000. But some archaeologists doubted the evidence warranted such expansive interpretations.
“Now we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape,” Dr. Arlen Chase said of the laser findings. “We know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.”
The Caracol survey was the first application of the advanced laser technology on such a large archaeological site. Several journal articles describe the use of lidar in the vicinity of Stonehenge in England and elsewhere at an Iron Age fort and American plantation sites. Only last year, Sarah H. Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham predicted, “Lidar imagery will have much to offer the archaeology of the rain forest regions.”
The Chases said they had been unaware of Dr. Parcak’s assessment, in her book “Satellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology” (Routledge, 2009), when they embarked on the Caracol survey. They acted on the recommendation of a Central Florida colleague, John F. Weishampel, a biologist who had for years used airborne laser sensors to study forests and other vegetation.
Dr. Weishampel arranged for the primary financing of the project from the little-known space archaeology program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The flights were conducted by the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, operated by the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley.
Other archaeologists, who were not involved in the research but were familiar with the results, said the technology should be a boon to explorations, especially ones in the tropics, with its heavily overgrown vegetation, including pre-Columbian sites throughout Mexico and Central America. But they emphasized that it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish “ground truth.”
Jeremy A. Sabloff, a former director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and now president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said he wished he had had lidar when he was working in the Maya ruins at Sayil, in Mexico.
The new laser technology, Dr. Sabloff said, “would definitely have speeded up our mapping, given us more details and would have enabled us to refine our research questions and hypotheses much earlier in our field program than was possible in the 1980s.”
At first, Payson D. Sheets, a University of Colorado archaeologist, was not impressed with lidar. A NASA aircraft tested the laser system over his research area in Costa Rica, he said, “but when I saw it recorded the water in a lake sloping at 14 degrees, I did not use it again.”
Now, after examining the imagery from Caracol, Dr. Sheets said he planned to try lidar, with its improved technology, again. “I was stunned by the crisp precision and fine-grained resolution,” he said.
“Finally, we have a nondestructive and rapid means of documenting the present ground surface through heavy vegetation cover,” Dr. Sheets said, adding, “One can easily imagine, given the Caracol success, how important this would be in Southeast Asia, with the Khmer civilization at places like Angkor Wat.”
In recent reports at meetings of Mayanists and in interviews, the Chases noted that previous remote-sensing techniques focused more on the discovery of archaeological sites than on the detailed imaging of on-ground remains. The sensors could not see through much of the forest to resolve just how big the ancient cities had been. As a consequence, archaeologists may have underestimated the scope of Mayan accomplishments.

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May 13, 2010

Mayan civilization is one of America pre-Columbian civilization. The Mayan civilization of Central America as a civilization thousands of years in the southeast of Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala in an area extending ruled.  Mexico’s southeastern five-state founded by Maya (Campeche, Chiapas, Quintana Roo, Tabasco and Yucatán), the dates for hundreds polish have produced and polish some of today still spoken 21-44 Maya language formation has provided. BC this civilization 600 due to the rise in the past, Anno Domini 3. century to the golden age (the classical period, AD 250-900) was a step, the political turmoil of the city-state has collapsed as a result of MS 900, until the existence of a large area and at the end of Spanish occupation was in the process. , if the Mayan civilization ended in many ways, contrary to common belief, is not no Mayans still live in this country and some of the Mayan languages are spoken.

“Ancient Maya” s (Maya point compared to today’s descendants used phrase), astronomy, mathematics, architecture and art at such an advanced level of civilization in many areas, they are. Rabinal Achim, Popol-Vuh, the Mayan Chilam Balam in such works of literature depicting the life of this culture is. 1697 Spanish occupation of the capital of the Mayan Itza Tayasal’ın  and the capital of Guatemala’s Mayan Ko’woj Zacpetén’in completed by taking the last Maya state of the capital in 1901 (Chan Santa Cruz)  has disappeared with the invasion by Mexico.

It is divided into three regions of the yeast home: South of the “Upper Lands” ı south (or the middle) “The Lands” and the north of the “Lower Lands” ı. “Upper Land” in Guatemala and Chiapas territory includes a high-altitude level. The lands south of the above “Land” takes place just north of Mexico Petén’i (Campeche), Quintana Roo’yu, northern Guatemala, Belize and El Salvador covers. Norton’s “The Land” the Yucatan   Peninsula and the rest covers Puuc expand hill.

Classic-month period from the extraordinary structures built and Nakbé, Mirador, San Bartolo, mercury, such as large cities have set up the Mayan classic period, they set up the famous city of some of Tikal, Quiriguá (both World Heritage List was taken) , Palenque, Copán, Río Azul, Calakmul, Ceibal, Cancuén, Machaquilá, Dos Pilas, Uaxactún, Altun Ha, Negras’tır Piedras. Religious center of Maya civilization in the most interesting monuments are the pyramids. The administrator of the palace, decorated with wall paintings and plaster houses of noble people among the interesting monuments are located. One of the interesting work in Maya, they operate with master stone sculpture, manager of the genealogy, military victories have been described, by Maya tetum (“tree-stones”), called monumental obelisks. Jade trade between the goods of yeast, cocoa, corn, salt, and obsidian stone can be considered. Yeast, such as front-Turks gave special importance to the jade stone.

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