TEDxMileHigh 2019

Read The Script:

The most astounding place I’ve ever been is the Mosquitia Jungle in Honduras. Having done archaeological fieldwork all over the world, I thought I knew what to expect, venturing into the jungle. But I was wrong. For the first time in my life, you should know.

First of all, it’s freezing. It’s 90 degrees, but you’re soaking wet from the humidity, and the canopy of trees is so thick that sunlight never reaches the surface. You can’t get dry. Immediately, I knew I didn’t bring enough clothing.

That first night, I felt things moving underneath my hammock. Unknown creatures brushing and poking against the thin nylon fabric. And I could barely sleep through all the noise. The jungle is loud, shockingly loud. Like being downtown in a bustling city. As the night wore on, I became increasingly frustrated with my sleeplessness, knowing I had a full day ahead.

When I finally got up at dawn, it was clear that my sense of unseen things was all too real. There were hoof prints, paw prints, and linear snake tracks everywhere. And even more shocking – we saw those same animals in daylight, and they were completely unafraid of us. They had no experience with people, no reason to be afraid.

As I walked towards the undocumented ancient city, our reason for being there, I realized that this was the only place I’d ever been where I didn’t see a single shred of plastic. That’s how remote it was.

Perhaps it’s surprising to hear that there are still places on earth so untouched by people. But it’s true – there are still thousands of places where humans haven’t stepped for centuries, or maybe forever.

It’s a great time to be an archaeologist. We have the tools & technology to understand our planet like never before, and yet, we’re running out of time. The earth, our cultural & ecological patrimony, is threatened by the climate crisis. I feel an urgency to my work that I didn’t feel 20 years ago – how can we document everything before it’s too late?

I was trained as a traditional archaeologist, using methodologies that have been around since the 50s. That all changed in July 2009 in Michoacán, Mexico.

I was studying the ancient Purépecha empire, a lesser-known but equally impressive counterpart of the Aztec. Two weeks earlier, my team discovered an ancient settlement, so we were painstakingly documenting building foundations by hand – hundreds of them. Basic archaeological protocol is to find the edge of a settlement so you know what you’re up against. My graduate students convinced me to do just that.

So I grabbed a couple of Cliff bars, some water, a walkie, and I set out alone on foot, expecting to encounter the ‘edge’ in just a few minutes. But minutes passed and then an hour. Finally, I reached opposite side of the malpaís. “Oh”, I said out loud, “there were ancient foundations all the way across. It’s a… city? Oh shit, it’s a city.”

Turns out, this seemingly small settlement was an ancient urban megalopolis – 26 square kilometers – a lost city with as many building foundations as modern-day Manhattan. An archaeological site so big that it would take me decades, the entire rest of my career, to survey fully.

Which was exactly how I didn’t want to spend the entire rest of my career – exhausted, sweating, placating stressed-out graduate students, tossing scraps of PB&J sandwiches to feral dogs (which is pointless, by the way, Mexican dogs have no interest in peanut butter). Just the thought of it bored me to tears.

So, I returned home to Colorado & poked my head through a colleague’s door: “Dude, there’s gotta be a better way.” He asked if I’d heard of this new technology called LiDAR: Light detection & ranging. I looked it up. LiDAR involves shooting a dense grid of infrared beams from an airplane toward the ground. What you get is a high-resolution scan of the earth’s surface and everything on it. Not an actual image but a dense three-dimensional cloud of points.

I had just enough left in the budget for a scan, so we did just that. The company went to Mexico, flew the LiDAR, and sent back the data. Over several months, I learned to practice ‘digital deforestation’, filtering away trees, brush, and other vegetation to reveal the ancient cultural landscape below.

When I looked at my first visualization, I began to cry (which says a lot – I’m incredibly manly, as you can see). In just 45 minutes, the LIDAR scan collected the same amount of data as what would’ve taken decades by hand: Every house foundation, road, building, terrace, and pyramid in incredibly high resolution, representing thousands of people who were born, loved, lived, and died in these spaces. And what’s more – the quality of these data was not comparable to traditional archaeological research – it was much, much better.

I knew this technology would change the entire field of archaeology in the coming years, and it did.

Our work caught the attention of a group of filmmakers searching for a legendary lost city in Honduras. They failed in their quest but discovered a lost culture now buried under a tropical wilderness using LiDAR.

I agreed to help interpret their data, and that’s how I found myself deep in that Mosquitia Jungle, plastic-free and filled with curious animals. Our goal was to verify that the archaeological features we identified using LiDAR were actually there on the ground. And indeed, they were.

11 months later, I returned with a crack team of archaeologists and other scientists supported by the National Geographic Society and the Honduran Government. In a month, we excavated over 400 objects at what we now call the City of the Jaguar. We felt a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the site as best we could, but in the short time that we were there, the site inevitably changed:

tiny gravel bar where we first landed our helicopter was gone. The grass was chopped down and the trees removed to create a large landing zone for several helicopters at once. Without it, after just one rainy season, the ancient canals we’d seen in our LiDAR scan were damaged or destroyed. And the Eden I described soon had large clearings and a central camp, with lights and a small outdoor chapel.

In other words: despite our best efforts to preserve the landscape as it was, things changed. Our initial LiDAR scan is now the only record of the City of the Jaguar, as it existed just a few years ago.

And broadly speaking, this is a problem for archaeologists. It’s impossible to study an area without changing it in some way. And regardless, the earth is changing. Ancient sites are destroyed, history is lost.

Just this year, we watched in horror as the Notre Dame Cathedral went up in flames. The iconic spire collapsed & the roof was all but destroyed. Miraculously, though, art historians Andrew Tallon and Paul Blaer scanned the Cathedral using LiDAR in 2010. At the time, their goal was to understand how the building was constructed. Now, their LiDAR scan is the most comprehensive record of the Cathedral, and it’ll be invaluable to the reconstruction. They never could’ve anticipated the fire or how their scan would be used, but we’re lucky to have it. 

We take for granted that our cultural heritage will be around forever. It won’t.

Organizations like CyArk and Virtual Wonders are doing incredible work to scan historical monuments. But nothing similar exists for the earth’s landscapes. We’ve already lost 50% of the world’s rainforests, we’re losing 18 million acres of forest each year, and rising sea levels will make whole cities, countries, and continents unrecognizable. Unless we have a record of these places, no one in the future will even know they existed.

If the earth is the Titanic, we’ve hit the iceberg, everyone’s on deck, and the orchestra is playing. The Climate Crisis threatens to destroy our cultural patrimony within a few decades. But sitting on our hands and doing nothing is not an option. Shouldn’t we save everything we can on the lifeboats?

Looking at my LIDAR scans from Mexico & Honduras, it’s clear that we need to scan, scan, scan as much as possible, as quickly as possible, before it’s too late. That’s what inspired the:

Earth Archive. An unprecedented scientific effort to LIDAR scan the entire surface of the planet, starting with the areas most threatened.

Its purpose is threefold:

Number One: Create a baseline record of the earth as it is today to more effectively mitigate the climate crisis. The only way to measure change is to compare two sets of data – a before and an after. Right now, we don’t HAVE a high-resolution “before” data set for most of the planet. So we don’t know how things are changing and whether our efforts to combat climate change are making a positive impact.

Number Two: Build a virtual planet accessible to any number of scientists so we can better understand our world today. Archaeologists like me can discover undocumented settlements. Ecologists can study forest composition, tree size, age, and distribution. Geologists can study hydrology, faults, and disturbance. And so on.

Number Three: Preserve a record of the earth for our grandchildren’s grandchildren so they can study & recreate our lost cultural & ecological heritage in the future. As science & technology advance, they’ll apply tools, algorithms, and AI to LiDAR scans done today and ask questions that we can’t currently conceive of. Like Notre Dame, we can’t imagine how these records will be used, but we know that they’ll be critically important. The Earth Archive is the ultimate gift to future generations.

Because the truth is, I won’t live long enough to see its full impact. Neither will you. But that’s exactly why it’s worth doing.

The Earth Archive is a bet on the future of humankind. A bet that together, collectively, as people & as scientists, that we will face the climate crisis. And that we’ll choose to do right thing. Not just for us today, but to honor those who came before us, and to pay it forward to future generations who will carry on our legacy.

Thank you.

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