Lost Under the Canopy

Nine hundred and seven candidates. One confirmed.

Lidar strips the forest off a landscape and finds cities. It has genuinely rewritten what we thought we knew about how many people lived in the Maya lowlands, in Amazonia, at Angkor. Those results are real and this book explains exactly how they were produced.

It also reports the author's own surveys over English downland, in full, including the failures. 907 candidate features went through the pipeline across six runs. One came back confirmed as a monument nobody had recorded.

And one of the recall figures he published turned out, when finally tested against points scattered at random over the same ground, to be worth nothing at all. That test, and what it cost him, is chapter nine.

You cannot count what you did not see. It does not follow that you may assume what was there.

Sotiris Spyrou runs machine-assisted landscape surveys and has never been in the field. Everything here was computed from open elevation data that anybody can download and check, and every run log is published.

Every factual claim carries one of five confidence labels. Every source is cited with a DOI you can look up. The back matter lists every claim that could not be verified at all.