The amount of stuff that seems to be hidden beneath forest and snow and mud and ocean is absurd.
A fair few things this could reference, but I'll use it as an opportunity to recommend reading the least likely option which is the book Ice Station by Matthew Reilly.
I'm sure they had their Homers and Platos.
I don't mean to sound like a cultural darwinist, but Athens and the library of Alexandria were razed to the ground and yet we still have Plato today because everybody who got their hands on his writings decided to read, translate, and disseminate it--there was no reason for the Romans to preserve his philosophy, no reason for the Arabian and Persian peoples either, and yet here we are today with complete versions of these texts translated into myriad languages over thousands of years, whereas other cultural properties, perhaps even from civilizations far larger, have simply disappeared, like the Egyptian materials for over a thousand years.
I don't think its wise to be too excited about these potential discoveries, because the reason why these cities can even be recognized and named as such by peoples (namely, us) living and analyzing them hundreds or thousands of years later is because of certain shared psychological and therefore social contexts. They may manifest in different forms, but the parallel developments of civilization across time, in different places, in completely separate contexts, is only on account of the shared, basic psychology of all humans, and in the end there will never be a remarkable difference between the kinds of texts produced by a predominantly agrarian society in the Ancient near-east, like the Egyptians, and a predominantly agrarian society in Mesoamerica.
In any kind of scientific endeavour it is never a good idea to be over-confident, nevertheless I think I have to claim that at this point in time anthropologists have developed a pretty good map of how human civilizations develop, from the totemic cults of tribal cultures to the cosmopolitan sprawls of modern urban centers: no matter where you look or what you examine, material cultures appear to progress in a basically similar manner. And, as I said above, there is no sense in trying to "recover" a lost culture, Mayan or otherwise; those cultures are still alive and well today--cultures never die, they just change, all we can do is create a map of those changes, we can never actually go back and fully understand how a people lived and experienced the world and how they expressed that experience in literature and philosophy, since our interpretation of that data will always be tainted by modern experience. But the map, and the contact with the Other, in the form of a "lost" culture, can show us that our modern experience is not the end all be all of the world, there will always be something in these cultures that escapes modern understanding, and I think that in that encounter something fruitful can be born, and therein lies the value of these sorts of investigations.
What you're missing is a history of conquest. Greece and Rome had a very intertwined cultural exchange. It wasn't just alexander that conquered land all over (all the way to india) and I am sure you know of how rome invaded it's way to the point they needed two emperors.
Civilizationd in america invaded each other but not the rest if the world. Same with Africa (outside of Egypt and few minor regionally invading countries). Even in asia, chinese never invaded india. Now Genghis obviously did more invading than alexander so I'd be interested in how much culture and history he spread but I think Rome is what made a difference in the western part of the old world. They built roads and encouraged people from different parts of the empire to travel and trade. Genghis had a habit of killing everyone that resisted but the romans kept them alive as slaves.
American culture and literature for example, I am sure will last many centtiries in other cultures.
How it could have turned much differently if there was a pacific coexistence with the conquistadores.
> The Classic Maya collapse is one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in archaeology. [...] Over 80 different theories or variations of theories attempting to explain the Classic Maya collapse have been identified. From climate change to deforestation to lack of action by Maya kings, there is no universally accepted collapse theory, [...]
What's your source or authority for claiming it was definitively the conquistadores?
European nations had been plagued by poverty, wars, killing, totalitarianism, witch hunting... For centuries, so when they reach the New World they continue to behave the same way they have been behaving until that point.
The only good part is that some countries were conquered and dominated by cultures that did not exterminated them. There was some mixing between peoples and the culture was enriched by that exchange.
It'd be nice
Not really the same thing you are talking about, and not global, but it can be fascinating to look at. You can see old logging railroads and things like that in Michigan, and trace them to where they collected and dumped into rivers.
https://apps.nationalmap.gov/lidar-explorer/
Click on a covered area, click one of the green icons listed next to each data set, then click on Potree Viewer in order to get to the 3D viewer (Potree in this case; I haven't tried the other one much).
Scroll down the sidebar and change the dropdown that says "intensity" to say "elevation". Right below that, tweak the slider bar to select the min and max elevations so that the landscape you're looking at gets colored with all the colors. At the very top, reduce the radius to 0 and increase the strength to 1.0. And if your hardware can handle it, increase the point budget to whatever is still responsive. Lastly, under filters, deselect everything except ground, if you want to see the ground instead of vegetation and buildings.
Also worth mentioning is the shaded relief derived from all this data, which you can find at:
https://apps.nationalmap.gov/3depdem/
It's very detailed and is a great starting point for your exploration of an area before jumping into the 3D viewer.
https://expeditionunknown.fandom.com/wiki/Pyramids_of_Legend...
https://expeditionunknown.fandom.com/wiki/Lost_City_of_El_Mi...
You know how light reaches the forrest floor? So does LIDAR.
If you get raw data from a LIDAR device (as opposed to the usual commercial internally "processed and smoothed" relatively low frequency data stream) you get a high frequency noisy cloud.
The HF cloud includes returns that bounced from the upper canopy and returns that bounced from the forrest floor.
You write your filters to pick the features (tree tops, tree foor, canopy density estimates, etc) you're interested in.
It's also possible to map recent snowfall depths with LIDAR | microwave RADAR tweaks.
According to [1], they rely on finding holmes in the foliage:
Lidar, of course, does not actually see through vegetation. Rather, it sees through holes in the foliage. Some of the multiple laser pulses it emits simply find openings between leaves and branches, in much the same way that sunlight filters through the forest canopy, continuing down to the ground.
[1]: https://www.gislounge.com/next-generation-lidar-seeing-the-f....
It’s important to realize that the laser pulse doesn’t remain at the same diameter the whole time; it’s path looks like a cone, albeit a very narrow cone. By the time it hits the ground it can be a couple of metres in diameter.
That two metre wide bunch of photons is what is travelling through the canopy. Some fraction hit the top of the canopy and are reflected; some fraction of the reflected photons travel back in a straight line to the detector, the rest are lost to the environment. The same process repeats until the pulse hits the ground, and whatever photons are left reflect back.
The energy returned to the detector is a tiny fraction of the energy sent out.
Smearing him as a promoter of pseudo-scientific theories without articulating your rationale is frankly weak-sauce.
I find your argument as un-compelling as those who smear others as conspiracy theorists so they can dismiss their claims without a second thought. Try harder.
Do these 'historic' finds serve any purpose for our future generations? Or would those trees have served our children better?
Some 14120 square miles of Guatemala is forested. While the 650 square miles of this archeological site represents a not-insignificant 4.6% of its forests, I doubt the archeologists are going to fell every tree and dig up every stump.
Since you care so much about trees, I have to ask, how many trees have you personally planted? How much money have you donated to tree-planting programs? Otherwise you're just virtue-signaling.
