Through aerial imaging technology, a scientific team sees past a jungle tree canopy to the totality of an entire Maya city, says Dr. Diane Z. Chase. She is Vice Provost in Academic Affairs, University of Central Florida. With her husband, Dr. Arlen F. Chase, UCF Anthropology Chair, Diane has lived 26 years near the study site of Caracol in the Belize rain forest.
Their goal, machetes in hand and slogging through jungle terrain, is to understand the Maya city that covers 200 square kilometers. Caracol is about the size of Baton Rouge, LA or Cleveland, OH or a third the size of Chicago.
Mapping and Ancient Maya City
During two and a half decades, the couple's team mapped nearly 25 sq km of the pre-European metropolis. They hacked their way through jungle and used line-of-site and electronic distance meters to create maps. They took photographs. This month, in three days a Cessna aircraft equipped with NASA LiDAR. ( Light Detection and Ranging) imaged ten times what Diane and Arlen struggled to see during a quarter century.
Dr. Chase said, "The first time is awesome. When I saw those city images, I was truly amazed! What effort the ancient people put into building those terraces. I'm close to speechless. Caracol is no longer a dot on the map. It’s a huge metropolis."
She now sees relationships between highways, buildings, and terraces. Dr. Chase is learning how Maya people situated themselves on the landscape, how far the settlement really extends, and asking more questions about population, activities, social structure, political systems.
"Once there were one hundred fifteen thousand Maya people there. There is no one today, but we can see it all," she said, nodding to technology.
NASA LiDAR Technology Advances Archaeological Study
LiDAR, used in military, space, and science applications, created images of Caracol's jungle floor by bouncing light off contours. About 2.38 billion laser impulses (short light beams) were fired by the Cessna on overlapping passes, yielding 4.28 billion measurements that translated into images, at first black and white, of everything beneath those trees, according to Dr. Chase.
The measurements consider time and distance to provide accurate renderings all the way to the surface. Scientists filter out upper points and model lower digital elevation points.
"No matter how dense the leaves, there are always pinpoint holes between and that's all this light needs. Virtually, you remove the tree cover," she explained.
Dr. Chase acknowledged LiDAR has been tried elsewhere in archaeological applications, but this is the first time any site as expansive as Caracol has been studied with LiDar and the first time the tree canopy has truly been penetrated. LiDAR technology, greatly improved in recent years, helped the flight crew make a series of parallel flight lines with enough redundancy for great accuracy.
The Drs. Chase and their team spent 26 different field seasons at Caracol and they aren't finished. Their studies plus LiDAR images provide a new depth of understanding of Maya culture and technology. She is confident that without the prior experiences, they wouldn’t have been able to put it all together.
"We have strong total context now, not just an image," Chase said.
Historic Caracol's Future in the Hands of Arlen and Diane Chase
What's next? The UCF team will use LiDAR to reveal more about population density and to view the a huge water reservoir system in detail. They're working to obtain funding to look at areas outside Caracol and to study long-term changes, comparing and contrasting the past and present.
Caracol is in middle of jungle, but the Drs. Chase shared their passion with their children, on site, from early preschool ages. Now grown, their two sons and daughter appear to be carrying that passion as one studies archaeology, one engineering, and one leans toward architecture.
Diane and Arlen Chase have a complete archaeological city. They can see how it was made and grew, while they explore green aspects of ancient culture: living areas in proximity to market places, food sources close to town centers, water treatment. Caracol has potential to show how much mankind's future may gain from the past, Dr. Chase thinks.
University of Central Florida Caracol Archaeological Project
The University of Central Florida Caracol Archaeological Project, directed by Arlen and Diane Chase, is a long-term collaborative effort with the Belize Institute of Archaeology. Funding for LiDAR work at Caracol was from a NASA grant to John F. Weishampel, Arlen F. Chase, and Diane Z. Chase. The work was facilitated in Belize through efforts of the Institute of Archaeology, specifically Jaime Awe and Brian Woodye. Ramesh Shrestha, K. Clint Slatton, Michael Sartori, and William E. Carter -- National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping -- carried out the airborne survey of Caracol and processed LiDAR point data. This article was developed from the writer's personal interview with Dr. Diane Chase.
Maryan Pelland - A professional, established freelance writer, I've earned the moniker, "expert" in technology for baby boomers. I have deep experience in ...
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