The Why Files: Operation Podcast
The Basement: Luke Caverns | LIDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding
27 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is LIDAR and how is it used in archaeology?
Today I'm talking with Luke Caverns, an anthropologist and explorer who's flagged over a hundred archaeological sites that aren't on any map. He's planning the largest LIDAR scan of the Amazon ever attempted. What is he trying to see, Jeff Bezos naked? Not that Amazon, the Amazon jungle. Ah, that makes more sense.
LiDAR fires laser pulses from aircraft through the jungle canopy and maps what's buried underneath. And over the last few years, it's been revealing megacities and ancient highways, a civilization buried under the Amazon that nobody knew was there. Today we're covering that, the Minoans of Crete as Plato's Atlantis, and the Olmecs and their jaguar priest cult. Yeah, cult based on cats. Hot piss.
He also has a theory about what happened to Alexander the Great's body that I hadn't heard before. It's pretty interesting. As always, after the episode, I'll come back in and do a breakdown of what we covered, what I can't prove, and what I can't. Until then, let's go down to the basement.
Luke, welcome to the basement. Hey, man. Thanks so much for having me here.
This is amazing. I'm so excited. I've got so much to talk to you about. We're going to go all over the agent world. I'm not a professional. It's chaos. Just bear with me. That's all right. So I just want to start with, of all the sites that you've looked at, what was the one or the one that sticks with you that makes you go, that is not natural? That's man-made. You have one favorite?
One that's, now you mean as far as like a natural formation that I think looks man-made? Yes, or something that you saw on LiDAR that maybe someone else didn't see. Oh, okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Someone made that.
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Chapter 2: What ancient civilizations are explored through LIDAR?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, you know, I'm running a project right now that I guess I'm announcing it right here for the first time. I don't have a name for the project, but it's a LIDAR project that I've been working on for about three years now across the southeastern U.S., and now it just expanded to the Amazon, which is crazy.
I was given access a few years ago to a LIDAR data set that a team put together when they were trying to map comet impacts across the United States. And anybody can get access to LIDAR of the US. The difficulty there is... having a map that's been processed and the information has been condensed. Otherwise, your computer will just shut down. It's crazy. What, just like giant raw images?
Yeah, yeah. It could be like hundreds of gigs of data. It'll just shut down your computer. So it has to be processed by a professional who really knows what they're doing. And so I was just lucky to be given... that sort of data set. And so what they realized was while they were looking for these common impacts, they were finding mound sites.
And they weren't anthropologists, didn't know anything about ancient history, but they're like, oh, you know, Luke, I'm friends with one of them. His name's Chris. And he sent it over to me, and so I started searching through it, and there was a lot that I had to teach myself about analyzing LIDAR and having to figure out what's natural and what's not or what's modern and what's ancient.
That can be a big thing. A lot of false positives with, like, flood zones. And with dredging. So they'll try to clear up the sides of rivers and they'll make what looks like just hundreds of mounds string together. Over time, you start to realize like, oh, okay, you know, these things are too sharp. There's so many of them together, you know. So you learn how to process all that image data.
And all in all, I've mapped at least like 82 archaeological sites in the United States. Probably a lot of them, probably so many of them are on private property. that are not officially documented in books or papers that I could find or maps that I could find. Now that said, there may be some obscure papers out there that are aware of some of these, whatever. They're not popularly known.
Some of them are massive, man. I've mapped sites that are way out in the forest in Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas. How big are we talking? single structures that are 250 yards long. Yeah. Yeah. 250 yards long by a hundred yards wide. And there's probably five or six of the structures altogether.
Some of them have, um, for anybody listening, you can look up something called the Hopewell road, which looks like these highways. Huge, right? Yeah. Huge. And, um, and I've found structures that have those in them. And I have a, I have a friend who he's about my age and he's,
more of like an open-minded archaeologist and more accepting to, I guess, like outlaw archaeology, which is kind of what I do. You know, now I'm working with my team at Basemap. They are providing me, going to be providing me, and we've already scanned like some sites near Moundville. We discovered an ancient site near Moundville on private property, just amazing stuff.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Luke face during his expeditions?
So that was cool. But there's a main shaft opening. There's two other ones. That was kind of like a periphery mine. That's way off to the East. The main central area is, There's two, so basically you would have like one shaft that descends down at 45 degrees. So it descends down at 45 degrees, it heads west, and then there is a refuge shaft that comes straight up.
That's probably like 150 feet up. So it's just this hole, right? You walk out in the middle of the desert and there's just a massive 15 foot by 15 foot wide hole. And it's so deep that no matter how close you get to the edge, you can never see the bottom. And you can feel the air like shooting out of it. Like you can feel the air hitting you as you walk up to it.
So there's no structure, platform, nothing, just a hole? Well, I threw a rock down there and you can hear it go ding, ding, and it hits all this metal. So there's structures down there. Oh, wow. And so my dad went and one of my other family members must be like a cousin of mine, but a niece of my dad, she had five other maps that we didn't have.
And so we got those from her and they were actually of the mine layouts. And this was after I had been to the sites. So I was now able to actually see how the mines worked and interconnected with each other under the ground. Who drew those maps? My grandfather. Yeah, so he was a cartographer. He drew all this stuff. Where did she find those? Those would have been helpful. She inherited them.
Yeah, yeah. So like two different... My uncles and my dad inherited some of the maps and I think all the artifacts. And she... Because her father was my dad's brother, right? She ended up getting some of the interior maps. So it was kind of split up. So now... Uh, I have everything other than the artifacts and my grandpa's gun. Everything is in my office, like all the maps, everything.
Um, I've got them all like framed up and some people online, they're either, sometimes there's photos of my office that get posts that I've posted and you can see the maps. Um, But yeah, all drawn out by my grandpa. And so much of it went unexplored. There are these huge shafts. And these are diorite mines. So super... They're probably still stable.
I just have to know that the air quality is good enough to go in them. But these massive shafts that he'd shine a flashlight down and there was no end to it. And so he has written on the map, it would say... It would say...
would say dug out by spanish unmapped dug out by spanish unmapped that's crazy so they'd been there for hundreds of years and he never he never got to explore everything and down at the bottom of this 150 foot shaft there's this massive open room with these other tunnels that take that that head off but they had collapsed and he hadn't explored them and you know it's very expensive to go in and like shore it all up to make sure it's safe and so it's just this massive sprawling mine complex
I would very much like to get lower down into into them to be able to explore them but I've got to do it with the right equipment it's expensive to put together but I definitely want to monitor air quality now so what would be the bad air down there what would cause that
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Chapter 4: What role did Alexander the Great play in the rise of Egypt?
One lifetime, this guy is born in an obscure kingdom and becomes basically emperor or king of all of Greece. Unites the entire Greek world underneath him. It's like Game of Thrones, the way he's able to do it. And this is probably a thousand city-states. It's a lot. It's a lot, yeah. And they're constantly fighting with each other. So powerful that he...
I believe basically had control of Athens and told Aristotle, you are going to come up to Macedonia and tutor my, tutor my son. That's right. So that guy's story to be able to conquer the Greek world in itself is mind blowing. And then his son turns around and, uh, you know, so we don't really know why Philip died or why he was assassinated.
You know, there's all these stories about like his lover or this, that, and the other. There's, But the reality is nobody really knows. One of the popular ideas is that Alexander thought that Persia had sent assassins to assassinate Philip, but that may or may not be true.
But he certainly uses it to gather the Greek armies and turn his sights towards Persia, because I believe that Philip did want to... do a run across the Turkish coast and free some of those Greek cities that are living there. And so that's what Alexander starts out doing. Well, within just a few battles between age 23 and 25, he has some of these key decisive victories.
Chapter 5: How was Alexander's body treated after his death?
And ancient wars are not like they're fighting every single day, they're doing this, that, and the other. It's just a few battles in one war. And sometimes they can be months or years apart from each other, but if they lose that battle, their territory is just crippled. So in a few decisive battles, he essentially pushes... the Persian Empire, all the way back to Babylon.
They don't have Anatolia anymore. And then he moves down to Egypt. And he never loses. He never loses. Never loses. Never loses a battle. Right. And he... At least not yet. In India, he kind of... They kind of keep him out of India. I think he vastly underestimated how big India was. But...
rather than pushing into Babylon and conquering Babylon, his advisors tell him that he needs to turn around and head west to go secure the breadbasket of the Persian Empire, which what fed the Persian Empire, what fed their whole army, is the grain that's coming from the Nile. It's the most fertile place in the ancient world.
So he goes in, he shows up to Egypt, and the Egyptians basically welcome Alexander with open arms, because the Egyptians hated Persian pharaohs.
Chapter 6: What significance did the Library of Alexandria hold?
The very first, we don't really know if this happens, but one of the stories that's passed down is Camp Isis, which is the first Persian ruler who becomes pharaoh in Egypt. When he shows up at Egypt, he kills, I think he stabs the sacred Apis bull together. He stabs it to death. And at this point,
probably from about 1000 BC to the end of Egyptian culture, like 325 BC, that's when Constantine shuts down all the temples and everything. The Apis bull is basically the main deity at this point. And so the story is that Camp Isis in like 525 BC stabs the Apis bull to death, which is just a massive middle finger to the Egyptian culture. They can't stand the Persians.
So they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms. And Egypt has a diplomatic relationship with Greece at this point anyway. Pythagoras is going back and forth. Yeah, yeah. They had known each other for a very long time. And they had always, you know, the Egyptians, as far as we know, had always been open and kind to Greece coming down. Herodotus comes to visit. Solon comes to visit.
I can keep going on. So he doesn't necessarily, Alexander, conquer Egypt as much as... shows up and secures it.
As much as the Egyptians know that they have no standing army, they're not going to be able to stop Alexander from coming in, but they know that maybe if they welcome him with open arms, he'll be a better ruler over them than the Persians had been, which probably would have been the case. It actually was the case. I mean, really what happened from Alexander...
coming into Egypt and the Ptolemies later becoming, that was a lot better for Egypt than the Persians. But they essentially welcome Alexander with open arms as much as they can. There's nothing they're gonna do about it. And so Alexander comes to Memphis. He probably sees the pyramids. I wish that we had surviving records of that.
There would have been Ptolemy, his best friend is with him this whole time. He wrote an account of all of this, either during his life or later in his life, Those were lost probably with the library being destroyed so many times.
But all of these accounts that we have, like from Plutarch and Arius, all these accounts of Alexander's life, they're drawing on Ptolemy's writings, which they had access to, but we don't. So there's so, who knows how many small details Ptolemy wrote that's, you know, for whatever reason, ancient authors were like, oh, well, I'm not going to repeat that part, but you know, whatever.
So, um, so Alexander to become officially Pharaoh of Egypt, they have to make this pilgrimage to the Siwa oasis. So they cross this vast desert out into western Egypt, and he meets with the oracle of Zeus Amun, which is basically a fusion of Amun-Ra and Zeus.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Luke share about the Olmec civilization?
The Inca people and like... Just really, really amazing place. Peru is very open to excavation and their history and all that. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, for a little bit there, I was the American representative to get funding for the excavation of the Chincana tunnels. With the MEC?
Yeah.
Not through them. It was just me working directly with Cusco's Ministry of Antiquities. So we were able to secure some of the funding for the excavation that they have for the tunnels that's there, and we kind of got that off of the ground. And so I was like the English-speaking ambassador for them, just trying to get funding to come in to get the project off the ground.
And now it's going, so I'm going to go in and check in with them this summer. So... So this guy who had grown up in Cusco late in his life in Spain, he's writing about all the things that he learned about. He's one of the sources for the legendary tunnels that are underneath the city as well. He alludes to them. I've never heard of these. This is the Mysterious Encounters of Subway Tunnels. Wow.
I've never heard it referred to as subway tunnels. Clickbait. Yeah, yeah. Probably it was connected to the Inca mysteries. They would probably go under the tunnels and who knows what would go on down there. You could emerge up at Sacsayhuaman. You go down in Sacsayhuaman, you go down into the mountain and you would emerge inside the city. We don't know if they're...
if there are natural tunnels that were modified or if the Inca themselves made it, but we know that they were real. But anyways, so he writes about these tunnels, and he also writes about, he tells us how the Incas, which Inca is actually the term of the ruler. That's the name for the Inca emperor, right? So you had like Monco, Inca, goes on and on and on. I didn't know that.
But when it talks about when the emperor himself would consult with the sun god, kind of like the pharaoh. Mm-hmm. The teachings that the sun god instructed the Inca emperor to have to be a good and moral emperor, which was such an important thing in all these ancient civilizations, it's such an important thing to be a good and moral person, that's in line... Garcilaso de la Vega. There we go.
I would have forgot that one too. Royal Commentary of the Incas. Yeah, I know. That's a big one. But he gives us an account of what he was taught from his mother's side of the family about the early philosophy of the Inca kings. And about a year ago when we got back from ā no, for my birthday, my wife got me the original printing of that book, like hardback copy. Original?
Well, well, I don't know why I said original.
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Chapter 8: How did the Minoan civilization influence later cultures?
Um, they were brought to the U S in like the early 1900s and there was a printing of them then. Yeah. So, um, so, uh, the original American one, they were made in New York. It's really, really cool. It's like deteriorates in my hands every time I hold it. But, um, so I'm flipping through the pages and I read the philosophy of, of, of like the founding of the Inca world. And, um,
and I'm reading this to her and I tell her, I'm like, I'm like, how similar does that sound to Christianity? How similar does that sound? And she was, she had just come with me to, to, to Cusco. She loves the Peruvian people. And, um, you could just see how kind that they were, and it's almost like they were connected to goodness. They're just good-hearted people.
And I was telling her, I was like, it just doesn't make sense to me that if God's real, that he didn't have a relationship with these people. If these teachings seem so similar to everything we know, you know what goodness is. You know what it means to be good. You can feel it when...
Like, there's a reason that all these philosophers come up with these rules of life and ways to treat each other, because inherently we know what's good and what's not. And you have thisāand if you're connected to that, that's what I feel like you being connected to God is. Because we don't need the Ten Commandments. We already know them.
Yeah, and you know the reality is there's no sense in even trying to have an argument for morality if you don't believe in something higher than just humanity.
There's nothing you can come up... There's no actual argument, philosophical argument you can come up with for why anybody should even care about how we treat each other if you don't believe in anything higher than this three-dimensional realm. That's true. You can try... And the only reason they try is because they feel it too. We all feel the pull to be good. We know what that means.
I believe very few atheists are truly atheists down deep. I think everyone believes something. I don't want to speak for everybody, but I think there are a lot of people who say, oh, I don't believe in God. You kind of believe in something.
Yeah, yeah, that's all of my interactions I've had with people who don't believe in God, but then you really start talking to them about it, and they're like, well, okay, well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I recognize there's got to be something that's like more than all, you know, you'll get that. But I think that's how everybody is because we all recognize it. There's so many things about our existence.
I actually think it feels, a few years ago, I had this thought that I was like, It feels so much more likely that you and I were always intended to exist and that our existence is not accidental That feels so much more likely than you and I just being some of the luckiest beings to ever exist. You know what I mean? I do. It's actually more likely that we were always supposed to exist.
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