Dr. James Fitzsimmons

Are there lost cities?

Yes, there absolutely are.

One of the really romantic things about being an archaeologist is that...

especially in a place like Central South America, is that you can still kind of go out, hack and slash, and find things.

It's an amazing experience.

LiDAR, of course, has changed things somewhat.

It's made things a bit more visible.

You can peel away the canopy, right?

People think LiDAR is this magical solution, and I suppose it is, but the same technology that's used in LiDAR

is used pretty much in every car nowadays, every modern car.

So all that driver assist stuff, that's what that is.

That's just LiDAR.

Same stuff, it's just lasers.

So it's changed things somewhat, but it's also really, I think, made...

made the process of discovering sites a bit easier, certainly.

But you can still go and find these things.

That said, it's really good at finding straight lines and straight sort of raised areas below the ground surface.

You can do that.

It's really sort of good at that.

But yeah, there's way more.