Courtesy BRASS/El Pilar
Experiment.com is a website dedicated to helping fund the next wave of scientific research. Bill Gates has endorsed the site saying, “This solution helps close the gap for potential and promising, but unfunded projects.” The platform is similar to the well known Kickstarter, only for funding scientific discoveries.
As cool as this is in general, there is a newly posted project that is of particular interest to the LiDAR related world. Scientific researcher, Sherman Horn, PHD, is trying to secure funding to map more accurate details of ancient Mayan ruins at El Pilar.
The project states that, “LiDAR mapping at El Pilar revealed several previously unknown large structures, but many smaller structures in low, swampy areas were invisible to this technique. This project will develop a program of field-checking LiDAR anomalies to clarify the patterns of small structures in seasonal swamps, where settlement models predict people would not live.”
An article on the work at El Pilar can be seen at Popular Archaeology.
If you decide to help support this project, leave us a comment. We’d love to know our readers have been a part of this historic project.
If it does receive funding, we’ll be looking to post an article about the findings in our Project Showcase section of LiDAR News.
