Yes but they dont have a fancy lidar so why bother.

Reminds me of this story (here simplified and from memory :-) about ancient Maya script that was deciphered once the brilliant code breakers had the inspiration to talk to the locals (who were still talking the script)

I know you say you’re describing from memory but wanted to comment in case other people read this comment and get the wrong idea: the decipherment of Maya writing was nothing like described here.

If you’re interested, a great popular account is given in Micheal Coe’s book Breaking the Maya Code or you can read an interview with David Stuart, who started work on Maya writing when he was ten! https://nightfirefilms.org/breakingthemayacode/interviews/St...

The controversy of the dominant early deciphering school ignoring the phonetic approach of the linguist Knorozov https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov seems a very real and important episode in the decipherement saga. The context here is not the history of Mayan glyph deciphering but the role of utilizing local knowledge

Exactly, my buddy who used to regularly visit Guatemala has paid drivers to bring him out to still-covered ruins and explore for the day. The locals know about this stuff.

Maybe "obscured by time" is a better description. Generally they know something was there, but the details and memories are as buried as the remnants of the place.

Everyone knows there are old sites there, they just discovered more of them.

You are making it sound like Guatemala have no historical institutions ...

The low hanging fruit is picked.

It's sorta like how Christopher Columbus "discovered" a new world ... that 50 million people were already living on.