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Re:Google SWE points 48 AI agents at NASA Lidar, finds unmap... by hanoz on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @10:59AM (#50454931)
I created the first online lidar map of the UK (well, England and Wales), as announced here many years ago (now at https://lidarmap.uk) and there have been dozens of finds of previously unknown sites of archaeological significance found using it that I'm aware of. Roman villas, forts, henges, all sorts of earthworks. New discoveries are being reported using this and similar tools almost weekly, on forums like https://www.reddit.com/r/LiDARdiscoveryUK/. Britain really is littered with this stuff.

Although it does feel the finds are getting increasingly hard to spot, every now and then you get a _how did anyone miss that_ moment. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the remaining impressive finds tend to be in woodland, using the Digital Terrain Model data which can peer beneath the forest canopy, like this Mexican one today, or are within newly released coverage which is promptly pounced on by armchair archeologists.

Not sure what my point is here except... to me this story still feels like a function of the amazing recent progress in lidar coverage and data availability (not to mention the incredible technology behind it), rather than an AI one, although I don't doubt that pointing a capable model and a healthy token budget in this direction might well be able to sweep up a few of the remaining discoveries.

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