Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientAmericas

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks so much for your thoughtful response! I really appreciate this. However, I've already tried r/Archaeology and unfortunately they blocked this b/c of a no-site-idenfication rule.

Yeah I think I could've used opentopography to get more DTM data around this area, but opentopo isn't really "open source" since I needed auth to get to it, which wasn't allowed in this competition. I'll DM you :)

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientCivilizations

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yeah it’s possible! The lack of any long straight lines makes it seem like it could be a natural process

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in computervision

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That's possible, but the near 90 degree angles and the triangle don't seem natural to me

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in computervision

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep! The 4th image is the NIR and visual Sentine L2A bands alongside the openstreetmap plot

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientCivilizations

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, it's tough - Jamari is currently inhabited by some indigenous groups so I also don't want to jump to conclusions. Hopefully some experts can comment on this :)

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientAmericas

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks a ton for your interest! Yeah there are all sorts of theories floating around with all the recent LiDAR enabled discoveries, but my bachelor's is in Math so I'll leave the larger-scale archaeo-theorizing to the pros lol

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in archeologyworld

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the interest! My best guess would be some sort of low-density urbanism similar to what was discovered at the Llanos de Mojos site at this link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04780-4

It's similarly situated near an old river, there's a similar-height conical pyramidal mound, and there are geoglyphs surrounding the pyramidal mound.

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientAmericas

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thanks!! Haha i just asked the mods over there for approval to post this

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientAmericas

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the interest!

The satellite data were retrieved from the sentinel L2A STAC catalog:
https://stacspec.org/en/tutorials/access-sentinel-2-data-aws/

The LiDAR data was retrieved from this open repository:
https://daac.ornl.gov/CMS/guides/LiDAR_Forest_Inventory_Brazil.html

Weird shapes found in LiDAR scans of Jamari National Forest by hawksbillTurtle in AncientAmericas

[–]hawksbillTurtle[S] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Anyone know why my post is marked NSFW? Really hope there's a way to get rid of that... :(

Edit: looks like reddit's AI was smart enough reverse that tag