I heard a podcast about the new laser mapping at Angkor Wat and it made me miss digging by hand.

The host said the tech found over 1,000 hidden structures in a week, a job that would have taken my old professor a lifetime, and it got me wondering if we're losing the feel of the dirt under our nails.

3 comments

3 Comments

park.robin19d ago

Your professor would have found different things though. A laser sees foundations and walls, but it misses the small stuff. It doesn't find the broken pottery piece or the lost coin that tells a human story. The tech gives us the map, but people still have to dig to read the pages.

rowanellis19d agoTop Commenter

Exactly, tech can't replace the human touch.

blair24811d ago

But what about the stuff that isn't a wall or a coin? Like, does the laser pick up on subtle changes in soil color or texture that a person on their knees would notice? Those shifts can show where a post hole was or an ancient path, things that don't have hard edges.