LIDAR magic
February 1, 2018 11:12 AM Subscribe
A Mayan megalopolis "In what’s being hailed as a “major breakthrough” in Maya archaeology, researchers have identified the ruins of more than 60,000 houses, palaces, elevated highways, and other human-made features that have been hidden for centuries under the jungles of northern Guatemala."
Wow this is awesome! There's a slowly building revision of American pre-Columbian history being put together. There were a lot of people in the New World before European disease and conquest wiped out 99% of the population.
1491 remains the best book I know on this topic. But it's 12 years now, I'd love to read something that incorporates newer scholarship.
posted by Nelson at 11:25 AM on February 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
1491 remains the best book I know on this topic. But it's 12 years now, I'd love to read something that incorporates newer scholarship.
posted by Nelson at 11:25 AM on February 1, 2018 [3 favorites]
this is cool!!!
posted by supermedusa at 11:56 AM on February 1, 2018
posted by supermedusa at 11:56 AM on February 1, 2018
The Lost City of the Monkey God is another recent book about this exact subject which is a really fun and fascinating read.
posted by something something at 12:25 PM on February 1, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by something something at 12:25 PM on February 1, 2018 [7 favorites]
I went to a seminar by Francisco Estrada-Belli of the article last year. They have one problem with the LIDAR images. They can't put them on the web, because the looters will use the data. There are so many thousands of unexcavated Maya sites in the region that they don't have the resources to investigate them all, but the looters will.
LIDAR is revolutionizing the archaeology in the region. What took weeks of mapping with a transit in extremely difficult terrain can now be done with one pass of LIDAR. One of the principal investigators of the site of Homul had been jogging around the site every day for years during the excavation season. It was only after LIDAR that he found that he had been crossing a Maya road (called a sakbe) every day that is obvious in the LIDAR images. It was only raised a few inches over the surrounding terrain, but the straight line on the LIDAR makes it obvious.
posted by Xoc at 12:31 PM on February 1, 2018 [15 favorites]
LIDAR is revolutionizing the archaeology in the region. What took weeks of mapping with a transit in extremely difficult terrain can now be done with one pass of LIDAR. One of the principal investigators of the site of Homul had been jogging around the site every day for years during the excavation season. It was only after LIDAR that he found that he had been crossing a Maya road (called a sakbe) every day that is obvious in the LIDAR images. It was only raised a few inches over the surrounding terrain, but the straight line on the LIDAR makes it obvious.
posted by Xoc at 12:31 PM on February 1, 2018 [15 favorites]
elevated highways
That explains what they built all those big stone pyramids for: Bridge supports for overpasses.
posted by sfenders at 12:40 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
That explains what they built all those big stone pyramids for: Bridge supports for overpasses.
posted by sfenders at 12:40 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
My wife and I visited Tikal about a year ago, it really is an amazing place. Our guide talked a bit about the vastness of the city still being hidden, and seeing some of the still covered ruins at the site, it's easy to understand how something like a 7 story pyramid could still be hidden in the jungle.
posted by borkencode at 12:59 PM on February 1, 2018
posted by borkencode at 12:59 PM on February 1, 2018
The Lost City of Z is another excellent book and where I learned about the pre-Colombian cities of the Amazon. Recommended.
posted by fshgrl at 1:19 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by fshgrl at 1:19 PM on February 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
I was just talking to somebody last night about how it seems like there is a new significant archaeological discovery almost everyday. This is mind-blowing. I would probably never hear about these discoveries in the US mass media without links in metafilter & regularly checking in with a Guardian.
posted by ezust at 5:08 PM on February 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by ezust at 5:08 PM on February 1, 2018 [2 favorites]
The NatGeo article is hitting all my mesoamericanist buttons, and not in a good way.
First, the rule of thumb is that until you've put trowels to ground, LiDAR imaging should be unconfirmed as to the specifics of scope, type, and use. Second, the "more than 60,000" new buildings are in a region that is already well studied and have been for decades (Tikal, for example, was used as Yavin IV in Return of the Jedi). The fact that these were large, poly-nucleated cities with extensive links to "suburbs" and interconnected with other polities in the region is not news and has not been news for decades, regardless of whether their full extent has been mapped or not.
Indeed, there's almost nothing new in the article, and that includes the hackneyed tropes used to describe the Maya. There seems to be a set of rules writers are required to follow whenever writing about Mesoamerica for a general audience, which include breathless amazement about how amazing it is that these societies were complex, urban, and connected, as though it should be a surprise that these peoples were not eking out a subsistence living in thatch hovels.
Then there's the inevitable comparison to some Eurasian society, most often Ancient Greece, but I see the author threw in ancient China for some spice. The intention, surely, is to give new readers some sort of familiar base, but the net effect seems to be again to cast Mesoamerican societies as a group of knock-off civilizations, who are just as good as the familiar greats, in the same way that Hydrox are just as good as Oreos. Even more importantly, Mesoamerica is a region with its own history, and one that is tens of thousands of years removed from centers of civilization in Afro-Eurasia. It is a region that, independently, developed agriculture, writing, cities, hierarchies of politics and religion, innumerable artforms, and so so so much more. The region did not borrow because there was no one to borrow from (ok, maybe metallurgy came from South America). It is less a place like ancient Greece than a region like far ancient Mesopotamia, where wholly new ways of life were developing and taking shape.
But they didn't use the wheel! Yet another awful trope, and one that is steeped in colonialism. The wheel is one of those "hallmarks of civilization" that 18th and 19th Century Europeans used as a club against the "primitive" societies they were busy proving their superiority to via violence and warfare. The "wheel = civilized" idea is so persistent that it is still a talking point used by white supremacists, despite the fact that there have been decades of publications showing how wheeled transport is only advantageous in specific areas with a specific set of circumstances. Hopkins' Economic History of Africa was published in 1972 and debunks this nonsense. In that vein, Mesoamericanists (and Andeanists) have, for decades now, pointed out that the wheel was known in those areas, but terrain and lack of draft animals militated against its widespread use.
What we do see in Mesoamerica is an organized system of porters who utilized well maintained roads between polities. In the Postclassic world of the Aztecs, these were they were called tlamemequeh, and they formed a generational class of people who were instrumental to the connectivity of that cultural milieu, where blocking a road was considered an act of war. The "raised highways" referenced in the article are sacbeob, and have been described in the English language literature for more than 150 years and have been an object of study for almost 100. The archaeologist Justine Shaw actually has a fairly recent monograph titled White Roads of the Yucatán: Changing Social Landscapes of the Yucatec Maya, if anyone is interested.
The point is, none of this is new, and neither is the conception of the Maya region, and particularly the Terminal Classic (i.e., the time of the "Maya Collapse") as a region of endemic warfare. Characterizing the Classic Maya as a group of peace-loving star-gazers who inhabited a sparsely populated region, occasionally gathering in their ceremonial cities to observe religious rituals, was a product of early 20th Century archaeologists like Sylvanus Morley and Eric Thompson. The latter man would influence and impede research on the Maya until his death in the 1970s, but since then there have been decades of work showing that not only were the various Maya regions densely inhabited, but that warfare and interlocking alliances were key aspects of the social, political, and religious life of these peoples.
Likewise with the notion that the tropics are inimical to complex societies. This is again a notion steeped in colonialism. It is a notion that ties together the work of early Mayanists with European colonialists, who saw the tropics as antithetical to civilization as the wheel was necessary. This is not a proposition that require refuting, because it is not a proposition supported by evidence. Civilizations, by any number of definitions, exist and have existed in the tropics. Amusingly, the famed Mayanist Michael D. Coe (whose Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs I highly recommend), is also the author of Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. The latter book was published 15 years ago.
So, again, none of this is new and the overused verbiage haunting every article about the Maya (or the Aztecs or Inca) needs to end. At some point refuting the racist misconceptions of yesteryear no longer serves to educate, but instead only serves to perpetuate those misconceptions. At some point repeating the archaeological revelations of a few decades ago no longer serves to educate the public, but to misconstrue the reality of contemporary knowledge of a region.
Franz Boas, more than a century ago, outlined a different way of approaching cultures, which did not seek to establish universal checkpoints in a cross-cultural ladder, but insisted that each cultural needs to be understood through its own historical background. Articles about the Maya are not better served by paragraphs of recycled copy trying convince the reader that these primitives aren't really primitives and really can be seen as just as good as the Greeks. It erases the actual history of these people and does nothing more than harken back to a misguided time when every society was seen as arrayed on a hierarchy with colonial Europeans at the top. There are amazing stories to be told about the Maya, they don't need apologies and couched phrasing.
Clearly, I have a lot of thoughts on this. Plate of beans and all that.
posted by Panjandrum at 8:58 AM on February 2, 2018 [60 favorites]
First, the rule of thumb is that until you've put trowels to ground, LiDAR imaging should be unconfirmed as to the specifics of scope, type, and use. Second, the "more than 60,000" new buildings are in a region that is already well studied and have been for decades (Tikal, for example, was used as Yavin IV in Return of the Jedi). The fact that these were large, poly-nucleated cities with extensive links to "suburbs" and interconnected with other polities in the region is not news and has not been news for decades, regardless of whether their full extent has been mapped or not.
Indeed, there's almost nothing new in the article, and that includes the hackneyed tropes used to describe the Maya. There seems to be a set of rules writers are required to follow whenever writing about Mesoamerica for a general audience, which include breathless amazement about how amazing it is that these societies were complex, urban, and connected, as though it should be a surprise that these peoples were not eking out a subsistence living in thatch hovels.
Then there's the inevitable comparison to some Eurasian society, most often Ancient Greece, but I see the author threw in ancient China for some spice. The intention, surely, is to give new readers some sort of familiar base, but the net effect seems to be again to cast Mesoamerican societies as a group of knock-off civilizations, who are just as good as the familiar greats, in the same way that Hydrox are just as good as Oreos. Even more importantly, Mesoamerica is a region with its own history, and one that is tens of thousands of years removed from centers of civilization in Afro-Eurasia. It is a region that, independently, developed agriculture, writing, cities, hierarchies of politics and religion, innumerable artforms, and so so so much more. The region did not borrow because there was no one to borrow from (ok, maybe metallurgy came from South America). It is less a place like ancient Greece than a region like far ancient Mesopotamia, where wholly new ways of life were developing and taking shape.
But they didn't use the wheel! Yet another awful trope, and one that is steeped in colonialism. The wheel is one of those "hallmarks of civilization" that 18th and 19th Century Europeans used as a club against the "primitive" societies they were busy proving their superiority to via violence and warfare. The "wheel = civilized" idea is so persistent that it is still a talking point used by white supremacists, despite the fact that there have been decades of publications showing how wheeled transport is only advantageous in specific areas with a specific set of circumstances. Hopkins' Economic History of Africa was published in 1972 and debunks this nonsense. In that vein, Mesoamericanists (and Andeanists) have, for decades now, pointed out that the wheel was known in those areas, but terrain and lack of draft animals militated against its widespread use.
What we do see in Mesoamerica is an organized system of porters who utilized well maintained roads between polities. In the Postclassic world of the Aztecs, these were they were called tlamemequeh, and they formed a generational class of people who were instrumental to the connectivity of that cultural milieu, where blocking a road was considered an act of war. The "raised highways" referenced in the article are sacbeob, and have been described in the English language literature for more than 150 years and have been an object of study for almost 100. The archaeologist Justine Shaw actually has a fairly recent monograph titled White Roads of the Yucatán: Changing Social Landscapes of the Yucatec Maya, if anyone is interested.
The point is, none of this is new, and neither is the conception of the Maya region, and particularly the Terminal Classic (i.e., the time of the "Maya Collapse") as a region of endemic warfare. Characterizing the Classic Maya as a group of peace-loving star-gazers who inhabited a sparsely populated region, occasionally gathering in their ceremonial cities to observe religious rituals, was a product of early 20th Century archaeologists like Sylvanus Morley and Eric Thompson. The latter man would influence and impede research on the Maya until his death in the 1970s, but since then there have been decades of work showing that not only were the various Maya regions densely inhabited, but that warfare and interlocking alliances were key aspects of the social, political, and religious life of these peoples.
Likewise with the notion that the tropics are inimical to complex societies. This is again a notion steeped in colonialism. It is a notion that ties together the work of early Mayanists with European colonialists, who saw the tropics as antithetical to civilization as the wheel was necessary. This is not a proposition that require refuting, because it is not a proposition supported by evidence. Civilizations, by any number of definitions, exist and have existed in the tropics. Amusingly, the famed Mayanist Michael D. Coe (whose Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs I highly recommend), is also the author of Angkor and the Khmer Civilization. The latter book was published 15 years ago.
So, again, none of this is new and the overused verbiage haunting every article about the Maya (or the Aztecs or Inca) needs to end. At some point refuting the racist misconceptions of yesteryear no longer serves to educate, but instead only serves to perpetuate those misconceptions. At some point repeating the archaeological revelations of a few decades ago no longer serves to educate the public, but to misconstrue the reality of contemporary knowledge of a region.
Franz Boas, more than a century ago, outlined a different way of approaching cultures, which did not seek to establish universal checkpoints in a cross-cultural ladder, but insisted that each cultural needs to be understood through its own historical background. Articles about the Maya are not better served by paragraphs of recycled copy trying convince the reader that these primitives aren't really primitives and really can be seen as just as good as the Greeks. It erases the actual history of these people and does nothing more than harken back to a misguided time when every society was seen as arrayed on a hierarchy with colonial Europeans at the top. There are amazing stories to be told about the Maya, they don't need apologies and couched phrasing.
Clearly, I have a lot of thoughts on this. Plate of beans and all that.
posted by Panjandrum at 8:58 AM on February 2, 2018 [60 favorites]
Oh, and for some articles to read to get a feel for the conteporary state of Maya archaeology, here's a few recommended pieces (I aimed for full text, hence the links):
- Sabloff 2007 "It Depends on How We Look at Things: New Perspectives on the Postclassic Period in the Northern Maya Lowlands" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 151 JSTOR
- Demarest and Rice 2004 The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation (actually a whole book, but a really good one if you want to dig into this time period)
- Andrews, Andrews, and Castellano 2003 "The Northern Maya Collapse and Its Aftermath" Ancient Mesoamerica, 14 PDF
- Aimers 2007 "What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands" Journal of Archaeological Research, 15 PDF
posted by Panjandrum at 9:09 AM on February 2, 2018 [15 favorites]
- Sabloff 2007 "It Depends on How We Look at Things: New Perspectives on the Postclassic Period in the Northern Maya Lowlands" Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 151 JSTOR
- Demarest and Rice 2004 The Terminal Classic in the Maya Lowlands: Collapse, Transition, and Transformation (actually a whole book, but a really good one if you want to dig into this time period)
- Andrews, Andrews, and Castellano 2003 "The Northern Maya Collapse and Its Aftermath" Ancient Mesoamerica, 14 PDF
- Aimers 2007 "What Maya Collapse? Terminal Classic Variation in the Maya Lowlands" Journal of Archaeological Research, 15 PDF
posted by Panjandrum at 9:09 AM on February 2, 2018 [15 favorites]
Like virtually every article about the Maya not in a journal, the author has to make it interesting to the layman. As long as they don't talk about aliens or lost tribes of Israel, I am okay with what they write as long as they don't lead the reader wildly astray. Most people don't have the context to understand more nuanced views.
And, as for Thompson, his contributions to Maya studies were immeasurable. I have his Commentary on the Dresden Codex open in front of me right now, and it is still the definitive writing on it, 46 years after publication. Yes, he fended off ideas that conflicted with his own such as Knorosov's, which held back breaking the Maya writing system for some time. But I tend to scoff when people have ideas about the Maya that I think are ludicrous until the evidence is overwhelming, too. He immediately admitted he was wrong when Tatiana Proskouriakoff masterfully showed that the writing on the monuments of Piedras Negras were about historical people. I think he (and Morley, as well) has been getting a bad rap in recent times.
To add something more on topic, LIDAR is not the solution to everything. You still have to have someone go out and examine the stuff that shows up in the photos. But, there are hardly the resources to excavate even major pyramids, so the LIDAR is showing much more about the common man structures. One thing that that has shown up in the images is the extensive water works and terraced fields the Maya constructed. This has started changing some minds about the population densities that could be supported by the agriculture in the area. It wasn't all slash and burn, and the population densities were higher than what people even a few years ago would admit were possible.
(Also, I fat fingered the spelling of the site of Holmul in my post above.)
posted by Xoc at 12:29 PM on February 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
And, as for Thompson, his contributions to Maya studies were immeasurable. I have his Commentary on the Dresden Codex open in front of me right now, and it is still the definitive writing on it, 46 years after publication. Yes, he fended off ideas that conflicted with his own such as Knorosov's, which held back breaking the Maya writing system for some time. But I tend to scoff when people have ideas about the Maya that I think are ludicrous until the evidence is overwhelming, too. He immediately admitted he was wrong when Tatiana Proskouriakoff masterfully showed that the writing on the monuments of Piedras Negras were about historical people. I think he (and Morley, as well) has been getting a bad rap in recent times.
To add something more on topic, LIDAR is not the solution to everything. You still have to have someone go out and examine the stuff that shows up in the photos. But, there are hardly the resources to excavate even major pyramids, so the LIDAR is showing much more about the common man structures. One thing that that has shown up in the images is the extensive water works and terraced fields the Maya constructed. This has started changing some minds about the population densities that could be supported by the agriculture in the area. It wasn't all slash and burn, and the population densities were higher than what people even a few years ago would admit were possible.
(Also, I fat fingered the spelling of the site of Holmul in my post above.)
posted by Xoc at 12:29 PM on February 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
BBC article, mentions " a Channel 4 programme called Lost Cities of the Maya: Revealed, airing in the UK on Sunday 11 February at 20:00 GMT."
posted by Nelson at 2:43 PM on February 2, 2018
posted by Nelson at 2:43 PM on February 2, 2018
the author has to make it interesting to the layman
Yes, but the tropes and language used more often act to impede and diminish a better understanding of the Maya. The casual reader does not need a re-hashing of the historiography of the Maya region which resurrects archaeological dead-ends and ideas about non-white (and tropical) peoples rooted in colonialism and racism. Gibbon is, like Thompson, someone who did amazing work in his field, but was ultimately wrong on the bigger picture, so it would be tiresome if every article about the Romans spent substantial copy on how a vaguely defined "we" used to think Christianity was the root cause of their decline, and elided over all the work done since then.
The Maya, and the Tikal area in particular, are among the best studied American groups. There is no need to re-enact the languages and tropes of 19th century travelogues in writing about them. Nor is there need to ponder (and I'm paraphrasing other articles on this topic) whether this finding will finally "unlock the secrets" of these "mysterious" people. There's plenty interesting and informative about the Maya to be found in the last several decades of actual research so the tendency to fall back on these long debunked ideas is irksome.
posted by Panjandrum at 6:34 PM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
Yes, but the tropes and language used more often act to impede and diminish a better understanding of the Maya. The casual reader does not need a re-hashing of the historiography of the Maya region which resurrects archaeological dead-ends and ideas about non-white (and tropical) peoples rooted in colonialism and racism. Gibbon is, like Thompson, someone who did amazing work in his field, but was ultimately wrong on the bigger picture, so it would be tiresome if every article about the Romans spent substantial copy on how a vaguely defined "we" used to think Christianity was the root cause of their decline, and elided over all the work done since then.
The Maya, and the Tikal area in particular, are among the best studied American groups. There is no need to re-enact the languages and tropes of 19th century travelogues in writing about them. Nor is there need to ponder (and I'm paraphrasing other articles on this topic) whether this finding will finally "unlock the secrets" of these "mysterious" people. There's plenty interesting and informative about the Maya to be found in the last several decades of actual research so the tendency to fall back on these long debunked ideas is irksome.
posted by Panjandrum at 6:34 PM on February 2, 2018 [1 favorite]
I work in this area (the laser scanning, not Guatemala), and I follow these guys a lot. I so much love this because it brings business my way when people are aware of its existence. This is so totally easy to do, but it's hard without funding. The equipment is costly for sure. The one scanner we use costs $100k out of the box. An aerial one like this, with compensation? Probably 300k easy.
I generally scan things like bridges and buildings and such with the same technology. We model them all up and make plans for renovations or adding equipment or whatever. But the technology is the same.
It's super simple. You fly a plane or helicopter over an area with a laser scanner on it over an area a few times. You know how even in the darkest part of a forest sunlight shines through? Same thing. It's just lasers and they hit the ground eventually through passes every which way. You can fly over a place 8 times in every orthogonal and diagonal direction and get a good idea of what is on the ground.
In office you can remove all the trees and vegetation and get this map of old structure. Much of it can be filtered automatically, but much of it is done manually too.
It's just super exciting the technology is still being used in areas like this to me, but this has been done for at least a decade. People just notice it every now and then.
People that use these scanners all the time sort of forget that's what can be done and we just do the day to day things with them.
posted by sanka at 8:25 PM on February 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
I generally scan things like bridges and buildings and such with the same technology. We model them all up and make plans for renovations or adding equipment or whatever. But the technology is the same.
It's super simple. You fly a plane or helicopter over an area with a laser scanner on it over an area a few times. You know how even in the darkest part of a forest sunlight shines through? Same thing. It's just lasers and they hit the ground eventually through passes every which way. You can fly over a place 8 times in every orthogonal and diagonal direction and get a good idea of what is on the ground.
In office you can remove all the trees and vegetation and get this map of old structure. Much of it can be filtered automatically, but much of it is done manually too.
It's just super exciting the technology is still being used in areas like this to me, but this has been done for at least a decade. People just notice it every now and then.
People that use these scanners all the time sort of forget that's what can be done and we just do the day to day things with them.
posted by sanka at 8:25 PM on February 2, 2018 [4 favorites]
The Lost City Of Zinj! The Myth Of The Killer Ape Is True!
No, wait.
Yeah, I actually was going to post this and then scrolled back to find this post. I can't believe it isn't getting more attention. This is ASTONISHING.
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM on February 2, 2018
No, wait.
Yeah, I actually was going to post this and then scrolled back to find this post. I can't believe it isn't getting more attention. This is ASTONISHING.
posted by hippybear at 9:10 PM on February 2, 2018
Panjandrum: First, the rule of thumb is that until you've put trowels to ground, LiDAR imaging should be unconfirmed as to the specifics of scope, type, and use. Second, the "more than 60,000" new buildings are in a region that is already well studied and have been for decades (Tikal, for example, was used as Yavin IV in Return of the Jedi).
Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College who led the project, speaks of Lidar with some awe, which may be why he's interviewed everywhere on this topic - it makes for a good story. But in one such breathless article for Washington Post, he said “There was this fortress in our area. In 2010, I was within 150 feet of this thing, which would have been a massive discovery in 2010.”
It sounds like there are still new buildings to be discovered, potentially.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:32 AM on February 5, 2018 [1 favorite]
Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College who led the project, speaks of Lidar with some awe, which may be why he's interviewed everywhere on this topic - it makes for a good story. But in one such breathless article for Washington Post, he said “There was this fortress in our area. In 2010, I was within 150 feet of this thing, which would have been a massive discovery in 2010.”
It sounds like there are still new buildings to be discovered, potentially.
posted by filthy light thief at 10:32 AM on February 5, 2018 [1 favorite]
Panjandrum: "Tikal, for example, was used as Yavin IV in Return of the Jedi"
Pedantry: Yavin IV is in Star Wars (or, if you must, "A New Hope"), not in Return of the Jedi.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:01 AM on February 9, 2018
Pedantry: Yavin IV is in Star Wars (or, if you must, "A New Hope"), not in Return of the Jedi.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:01 AM on February 9, 2018
More lidar driven archaeology; this time in Mexico "While less well known than the Aztecs, the Purhépecha were a major civilisation in central Mexico in the early 16th century, before Europeans arrived and wreaked havoc through war and disease. Purhépecha cities included an imperial capital called Tzintzuntzan that lies on the edge of Lake Pátzcuaro in western Mexico, an area in which modern Purhépecha communities still live. Using lidar, researchers have found that the recently-discovered city, known as Angamuco, was more than double the size of Tzintzuntzan – although probably not as densely populated – extending over 26 km2 of ground that was covered by a lava flow thousands of years ago."
posted by dhruva at 9:06 AM on February 15, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by dhruva at 9:06 AM on February 15, 2018 [1 favorite]
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