An aerial laser scan of more than 800 square miles of Guatemalan jungle revealed Maya buildings, canals, roads and bridges. Christopher Intagliata reports.

航空激光对超过800平方英里的危地马拉丛林的扫描结果向我们展示了玛雅建筑，运河，道路和桥梁。克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔报道。

撰文播音 克里斯托弗·因塔利亚塔（Christopher Intagliata）

翻译 Neo

审校 许楠

If there's a fifth Indiana Jones movie, Indy might want to use one of the hottest new tools revolutionizing archaeology: LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, which allows archaeologists to survey ancient sites from the skies.

如果有第五部印第安纳.·琼斯出演的电影,他大概会想用一种热门的新工具发起考古学新革命---LiDAR ,或称为光学雷达。这种技术可以让考古学家在空中研究古代遗址。

"Think of an impressionistic painting, the closer you look at the painting, the closer you look at the painting you see the brush strokes. When you pull away, suddenly it's obviously the face of a woman in a park. You know, your brain can interpolate that stuff better at a distance."

“想象一幅印象派绘画,越靠近画作,就越能看清画笔笔触。而把画面拉远时,公园中女人的脸才会倏地跃然纸上。于是你就明白的大脑在远距离情况下可以更好地处理影像。”

Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University. 

杜兰大学的考古学家马尔塞洛·卡努托如是说。

"LiDAR allows us to see these small little features that close up look like little pieces of data that we're not sure what to do with, but when you zoom out, there it is, clear as day."

“近看这些小小的遗迹，就像一个一个的小块数据，我们无从下手, 但是LiDAR 让我们把镜头拉远，一切便昭然若揭。”

The technology works like radar, but shoots laser pulses instead of radio waves, to 3-D map a landscape. In 2016 it was used to map over 800 square miles of Guatemalan jungle, including the area around the famous tourist site Tikal. Canuto remembers when he and his colleagues first saw the footage. 

这种技术与雷达相似,不过它发射的不是无线电波而是激光电波，从而对景观进行三维绘制。2016年，它被用于绘制800多平方英里的危地马拉丛林地图，包括着名的旅游景点蒂卡尔周围的地区。 卡努托记得当他和同事们第一次看到镜头时的场景。

"One hour went into two, went into three. We just lost track of time. It got dark outside, we were just open mouthed, we couldn't believe what we were seeing." 

一个小时,两个小时,三个小时。我们忘记了时间。外面天黑了,我们张着嘴,对看到的感到难以置信。

What they discovered, after careful analysis, were buildings in areas they'd already excavated. And big landscape-level features, like canals and roads, bridges, ditches and walls.

经过仔细分析,他们发现这是已经发掘过的地区的建筑，以及一些大型景观级别的遗迹,比如运河,道路,桥梁,沟渠和墙壁。

"It was a very humbling moment for all of us. To be able to think, wow, that was under our feet the whole time and we didn't recognize it." Overall, the density of structures suggests a population of somewhere between seven and 11 million people in the region, more than 1000 years ago - which aligns with previous estimates. 

Maps, photos and a catalog of what they found are in the journal Science. [Marcello A. Canuto et al., Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala]

“这真是激动人心的时刻。我们在想，哇哦，原来它一直在我们脚下，只是我们过去没有认识到它。”总之，遗迹结构密度表明，在1000多年前，该区域的人口在700-1100万人之间，这与之前估计的一致。研究发现的相关地图，照片以及目录信息发布在《科学》（Science）期刊上。

Nearly 100 years ago, the famous aviators Anne and Charles Lindbergh flew over some of the same swaths of jungle, taking photographs from the sky, partly in hopes of aiding archaeologists. "It was very early appreciated that under the jungle canopy there was a lot to see. If we could only see through the jungle canopy." Now, we can. And it's a foundation, Canuto says, for an entirely new era in archaeology. 

大约100年前，著名的飞行员安妮和查尔斯·林德伯格飞越了同一片丛林并且从空中拍摄了照片，部分初衷是希望能对考古学家有所帮助。“人们很早就意识到在丛林林冠下有很多东西值得探索——如果我们有能力透过丛林林冠进行观察的话”而现在，我们能够做到了。卡努托说，这将是开启一个全新的考古学时代的起点。