Ars Technica: You’re known for bringing cutting-edge tools such as Lidar to the field of archaeology. But you’re not just taking scans, you’re finding ways to re-create what things likely looked like, helping people who are not specialists get a very real sense of these civilizations.
Albert Lin: I think of Lidar as a new tool that came on the scene, like the microscope or a telescope. It’s like, oh my gosh, now you can see everything, but you’ve still got to make sense of it all. For archeology, the first part is trying to see the hints with the Lidar, and then working with the archeologists who have dedicated their lives to interpreting the stones on the ground. We bushwhack in with machetes and snake gators and trowels. You end up getting down to the ground level, even picking up a piece of pottery.
You can tell certain things in the pottery, how old the site might be or the ways in which they created art. But then you put your hand across the thumbprint that’s in the pottery itself, and you feel the humanity locked in time, 2,000 years buried in the ground. You put yourself in the place of the person who placed it there, and you start to get a sense of why someone did that. It’s almost like you hear their poetry. It becomes so much deeper than some typographical model of the archeological site. It becomes this window into a shared humanity that expands your own being. All the technology we bring, it’s great. But the real thing I’m seeking is that feeling. We spent a lot more time in this new season with the VFX and the reconstructions to try and rebuild that ancient world in a way that makes you feel it.
We had this moment in the jungles of Mexico, early Maya stuff that has never really been seen before in terms of the style—these three-sided pyramids. You lay it all out on the map across this lake system and they’re all in some alignment. Why are they all pointed in this one direction? We modeled the course of the sun over different times of year through antiquity, but we couldn’t figure out the [source of an alignment]. On the very last day of the shoot, the lead archaeologist says, “Try August 15th.” We plugged it in and realized, oh my god, the whole thing is aligned to this one date on the calendar. August 15th is the origin day, it’s the first day of the Maya calendar. I found that wildly profound.
