How much of our world has been taken back by Mother Nature? How many cities have been forgotten because of how hidden they are? Someone had that same thought about ten years ago and to solve this problem they used a device called the LiDAR system.

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These researchers are actually shooting lasers through the ground just to see what's down there. The aerial LiDAR system is a surveying method that measures the distance to a target by illuminating the target with a pulsed laser light, and after the lasers pierce through things such as vegetation, they return to a receiver that calculates the shape of the object. It’s almost like normal eyesight, as our eyes pick up light that reflects off of things, and our brain can understand how far the light travelled to reach our eye.

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That’s not all it does, though. The system itself actually has been used to find and map out entire cities, like Ciudad Blanca in Honduras, more commonly known as the White City. “The City of the Monkey God,” as referred to by National Geographic, was an entire city that has been so well-hidden that “researchers don’t even have a name for [the culture it belongs to] yet.” There’s an obvious problem to this system, though. It’s expensive. The Verge reported that “A single survey cost [NCALM, the team behind the archeological usage of LiDAR] $150,000,” and it’s not like that kind of money grows on trees. At the same time, though, think of the future of this technology. Even though it’s technically been in development since the ‘60s, it’s only been in use by archeologists for about ten years. The White City was only found in the last half-decade!

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Eventually, if the technology could even find its way through soil, it could uncover an endless amount of history. Current day archaeologists agree that about 90 percent of Ancient Rome is beneath the earth because of how much the River Tiber flows through the city. Maybe this technology could one day find the other 90 percent of Ancient Rome. In the immediate future, the team’s short-term goal is to attach the equipment to planes, which would be able to survey bigger areas than what they’re currently using. For now, though, with the use of the LiDAR system, archaeologists can at least begin to find even more hidden cities in the jungle.