Drone lasers reveal hidden roads under the jungle near Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu is one of the most photographed places on Earth, yet the forest around it is still hiding roads that nobody has mapped. This year, a Polish-Peruvian team used drone-mounted laser scanning to find more than 2.5 kilometres (about 1.5 miles) of previously unknown roads on Mount Yanantin. The roads predate the arrival of Columbus, and the researchers say there are probably many more still waiting.
Why this corner of Machu Picchu matters
Machu Picchu has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983, and the national park around it protects more than 60 archaeological sites. Most visitors only see the famous citadel. The surrounding slopes, which rise from roughly 2,000 to 2,700 metres above sea level, are covered in dense cloud forest that makes ordinary survey work extremely hard.
A team from the University of Warsaw’s Andean Research Centre has worked in the park since 2008. It is one of only two foreign groups with permission to do fieldwork there; the other is Japanese. This season the work took place in July and August, with cooperation from Peru’s Regional Directorate of Culture in Cusco and the Machu Picchu Archaeological Park. The University of Warsaw funded the project.
How the team saw through the jungle
The key tool was LiDAR, which stands for light detection and ranging. A drone flies over the forest and fires laser pulses at the ground. Some pulses bounce off leaves, but others slip through gaps and reach the soil. Software then filters out the vegetation and leaves a digital model of the terrain underneath, where even a faint ancient road shows up as a line.
Bartłomiej Ćmielewski of the Wrocław University of Science and Technology led the research and supervised the drone surveys. Nino del Solar Velarde, from the Machu Picchu Archaeological Research Coordination Unit in Cusco, supervised the fieldwork on the ground. Jan Kłaput, Paweł Dąbek and Jeff Rocky Contreras Soto also took part.
What they found on Mount Yanantin
The scans showed more than 2.5 kilometres of unknown roads on the slopes of the mountain. One clearly defined stretch runs for at least 1.2 kilometres. Alongside the roads, the data revealed terraces, platforms and circular structures. The team describes the roads as pre-Columbian and likely Inca, although that attribution is still an interpretation.
A LiDAR image only gets you so far, so the team went to check. That meant walking the terrain and cutting through undergrowth with machetes. The jungle is so thick that clearing just 250 metres took about three hours. The researchers also noted that a path known to local people was less than one metre wide, which shows how easy it is to miss these features.
Prof. Mariusz Ziółkowski, director of the Andean Research Centre, said the machete episode “illustrates the scale of the challenge.” He added that the team expects much more: “There are certainly at least twice as many out there, though.”
What roads can tell us
Roads are more than lines on a map. They show how people moved between settlements, farms and ceremonial places, and they hint at how an empire organised labour and travel in difficult mountain terrain. Terraces and platforms next to a road suggest people lived, farmed or worked there too. Mapping them together helps researchers understand the whole landscape around Machu Picchu rather than just the famous citadel.
The finding also shows how much LiDAR is changing archaeology in places that are hard to reach. Features that would take years to find on foot can appear in a single flight, and then archaeologists can focus their effort on the most promising spots.
What we still do not know
Only the first stage of the LiDAR analysis is complete, so the numbers will likely change. The estimate of “at least twice as many” roads is an expectation, not a measurement. The team has not yet dated the roads precisely or shown who built them, and “likely Inca” remains a working label until further fieldwork and analysis.
The researchers plan to keep going. Ćmielewski says the team will continue the LiDAR survey and wants to expand the research area. If the forest hides this much so close to one of the world’s best-known monuments, the next season may add a great deal to the map.
Sources
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