This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

If there's a fifth Indiana Jones movie,

Indie might want to use one of the hottest new tools revolutionizing archaeology,

LIDAR or light detection in ranging, which allows archaeologists to survey ancient

sites from the skies.

Think of an impressionistic painting.

The closer you look at the painting you see the brush

stroke when you pull away suddenly it's obviously the face of a woman in a park or something.

Your brain could sort of interpolate the stuff better at a certain distance.

Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist at Tulane University.

Lider allows us to see all these small little features that close up look like little pixels of data that we're not sure what to do with but when you zoom out, oh, there it is, clear as day.

The technology works a lot like radar, but it shoots laser pulses instead of radio waves

to 3D map a landscape.

In 2016, it was used to map over 800 square miles of Guatemalan jungle, including the area

around the famous tourist site Tikal.

Canuto remembers when he and his colleagues first saw the footage.

One hour went into two, went into three, we just lost track of time. It got dark outside. We were just, you know,

open mouths. We couldn't believe what we could be seen. What they discovered after careful analysis were buildings in areas they'd already

excavated and big landscape level features like canals and roads, bridges, ditches, and walls.

It was a very humbling moment for all of us,

you know, to be able to see, it's like, wow,

...