The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

NCALM owned a small Cessna Skymaster that had had its guts ripped out to carry a big green box containing the million-dollar lidar machine. A pilot trained in lidar missions flew the aircraft from Houston to Belize, where he was joined by three mapping engineers. The team flew five missions over Caracol and its environs, scanning the rainforest with lasers, a process that took a little over a week. When the images came back, the Chases were floored. “Seemingly without effort,” they wrote, “the system produced a detailed view of nearly eighty square miles—only 13 percent of which had previously been mapped—revealing topography, ancient structures, causeways, and agricultural terraces,” as well as caves, terracing, buildings, tombs—tens of thousands of archaeological features that their ground-mapping had missed. In five days, lidar had accomplished seven times more than the Chases had achieved in twenty-five years. Their paper declared lidar a “scientific revolution,” and an “archaeological paradigm shift.” It was, they said, the greatest archaeological advance since carbon-14 dating.