Fall 2022 Faculty Spotlight:
Celebrating the Life and Work of Dr. Leila Monaghan
Summer 2022 Spotlight: Dr. Leszek Pawlowicz and Dr. Chris Downum, Breakthrough in Archaeological Applications of Machine Learning
Spring 2022 Spotlight: Dr. Lisa Hardy, Community-Engaged Medical Anthropology
Winter 2022 Spotlight: Dr. Melissa Libert, Human Biology and Health
Sociocultural Anthropology
Archaeology
Fall 2024 Faculty Spotlight: Meet Luke Auld-Thomas
Remote sensing of ancient Maya urbanism and its long-term environmental legacy
Luke Auld-Thomas is joining NAU Anthropology this fall as part of a cluster of experts in Remote Sensing
Remote sensing technologies are transforming archaeology with a torrent of new data, allowing researchers to revisit some of the discipline’s most elemental and stubborn research problems while also posing a host of new and exciting questions.
Nowhere have these changes been more powerfully felt than in the Maya Lowlands of northern Central America, where airborne laser scanning (a.k.a. lidar) has revealed a landscape utterly transformed by human activity and subsequently blanketed—and thus preserved—by dense forest for a millennium. Luke Auld-Thomas’ ground-breaking work introduces recent and ongoing research that uses remote sensing to reconstruct the magnitude of ancient populations and the extent of pre-Columbian urbanization across the Maya Lowlands. He also looks at how the same data now being used to map ancient settlement systems are poised to shed new light on the ecology of post-urban landscapes in Mesoamerica and beyond.
Luke Auld-Thomas’ work has been featured in lots of news stories and academic paper. A few are linked below.