Along with Steve Elkins and Under the LiDar, LLC, professors Ramesh Shrestha and William Carter have mapped some of the terrain in Honduras. | Courtesy of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, UH for UTL, LLC
The ancient myth of the existence of the lost city of Ciudad Blanca, Honduras may soon be confirmed.
Two UH professors, Ramesh Shrestha and William Carter, are using their knowledge and skill regarding an Airborne LiDar to map a remote region of the country’s Mosquitia rain forest, a project lead by Steve Elkins and funded by a Hollywood film production company.
Both Ramesh Shrestha, director of the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, and William Carter were able to assist archaeologists — who have spent years on ground-work — in finding what may appear to be building ruins and agricultural terraces.
“I think that the head of the project, Steve Wilkins, was also the motivator and the pusher of the project,” Carter said.
“He said if it turns out to be what archaeologists were trying to find, they will be on the ground for decades studying the time.”
Researchers from NCALM, funded by the National Science Foundation, joined into a collaborative effort with the University of Houston and University of California-Berkeley, being among the first to become a part of the research.
This project was strictly under the Geosensing Systems Engineering Graduate Research Program at UH.
By using the Airbone LiDar, UH professors were able to view beneath the highly dense canopy by blanketing areas of the canopy with billions of lasers.
Based upon what the technology was able to see — what appear to be man-made features — will now result in a ground exploration early next year.
The Airborne LiDar is able to give the information to the scientists quickly, so they can advance and expedite the science, instead of waiting to map the region in another generation.
Digital Elevation Models were also used in the research and were generated from XYZ coordinates. They will allow researchers to see how high possible buildings were and what size they were by producing geodetic images below surface of the rainforest.
“After processing, we did see things that don’t look like nature could do. It looks like there were some man-made features on the canopy,” Shrestha said.
Despite their speculation, Shrestha and Carter’s sole purpose was to find out what the technology can provide to look beneath the surface of the canopy.
It is up to the archaeologists to further determine what the professors actually found.
“I believe the sight (we mapped) was much larger than (the archaeologists) knew. The terraces were subtle. Some of them were different by more than a foot. On the ground you can’t tell if you’ve come to the edge of the terrace; it’s very difficult to do that. The city may have had two-to-three times the people they estimated,” Carter said. “We know it’s not just one or two small buildings; they built roads. (What we’ve done), it doesn’t replace the archeologists on the ground who take the age of the ruins and taking samples, looking for particulars. We are added value.”
