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Why does nobody mention that most 'lost city' headlines are just LiDAR surveys of stuff locals already knew about
I keep seeing these huge headlines about a lost city discovered in the Amazon or a hidden Maya complex, and when I read past the first paragraph it's almost always a LiDAR scan of an area that local farmers have been plowing around for generations. A friend of mine works on a survey project in Belize and she says the villagers knew exactly where those mounds were, they just never had a reason to write it down for a journal. That doesn't make the LiDAR work worthless, the mapping is real and it shows the scale of things, but framing it as a discovery when people have lived next to it forever feels off to me. I'm just a dental hygienist with a library card, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think the language matters for how the public trusts the field. Does anyone know of a project that credits the local knowledge up front? I'd love to read one.
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