The Basement: Luke Caverns | LiDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding
episodePreviously titled “The Basement: Luke Caverns | LIDAR Is Revealing Ancient Cities the Amazon Was Hiding” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 2, 2026
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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.
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?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is LIDAR and how is it used in archaeology?
0:00–1:47
2
What ancient civilizations are explored through LIDAR?
1:47–31:08
3
What challenges does Luke face during his expeditions?
31:08–1:27:51
4
What role did Alexander the Great play in the rise of Egypt?
1:27:51–1:29:23
5
How was Alexander's body treated after his death?
1:29:23–1:30:29
6
What significance did the Library of Alexandria hold?
1:30:29–3:03:30
7
What insights does Luke share about the Olmec civilization?
3:03:30–3:06:25
8
How did the Minoan civilization influence later cultures?
3:06:25–4:37:57
Speakers
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