One idea on vacation, 48 AI agents and NASA lidar: a developer finds an unmapped Maya site

"I'm not an archaeologist, so I didn't know this was supposed to be hard," Pietro Miotti wrote on his blog on Nov. 10. His X post saying his AI agents had found an unrecorded Maya site under the Mexican jungle drew about 3,400 likes. It took less than 72 hours from a passing thought while traveling in Peru to a reply from Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).

He asked Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok what Hiram Bingham, the explorer who reached Machu Picchu, would do with today's tools; all said lidar. The agents turned about 1,200 km² of NASA lidar strips into images, and 48 agents went through them one by one looking for pyramids, platforms and plazas, with no special model or classifier, just a written guide.

After checking literature and archives, one candidate remained: a cliff-edge hilltop with a levelled plaza, an oval pyramid at least 8 to 12 meters tall, a raised courtyard and what may be a reservoir. The agents checked the raw point cloud to rule out tree artifacts, drafted a report in Spanish, and INAH replied that no registered site exists at that location.

Miotti stressed it is not official yet; the next step is a visit by archaeologists with permits, which Mexican federal law requires. In 2024 archaeologists found an entire Maya city in Mexico using lidar. One reply said: "My agents recently also found a different unmapped site in Mexico."