The Lost City of the Monkey God

by Douglas Preston

Explorers had discovered Caracol in the 1930s and realized it was one of the largest cities in the Maya realm. The article told the story of how, in the 1980s, the husband and wife team of Arlen and Diane Chase had begun the daunting project of mapping Caracol and its environs. For twenty-five years, the Chases and teams of assistants and students tramped through the rainforest, recording and measuring every wall, rock, cave, terrace, road, tomb, and structure they could find. By 2009 they had created some of the most detailed maps ever made of a Maya city. But over the years of work, the Chases felt continually frustrated. The city was enormous, and they always had the uneasy sense there was a great deal they weren’t finding, due to the thickness of the jungle and the struggle and dangers of mapping in such an environment. “We cut paths with machetes,” they wrote, “scramble through thick underbrush, and wonder what we might be missing.” They longed for a better way to map the city without, they said, “spending another twenty-five years in the field.” And so they turned to a new tool: lidar. Although lidar had been used for mapping the moon’s surface and doing large-scale terrestrial charting, only in the previous decade had it gained the resolution necessary to resolve fine-scale archaeological features. It had been used to map the ruins of Copán after the hurricane, but that was about the extent of its use in Central America. The Chases joined forces with NASA and the Na...