NASAWhat they did
Miotti, a software engineer who says plainly they are not an archaeologist, wondered while travelling in Peru what an explorer would do with today's tools. After brainstorming with Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok, Miotti settled on public NASA lidar of the Maya lowlands, which sees the ground through the jungle canopy. One evening the agents were set to turn about 1,200 km² of lidar strips into images. Then 48 agents went through them one by one, following a written guide to spot pyramids, platforms and plazas and to rule out hills, sinkholes and roads. No special classifier was used. Miotti then asked the agents to check the literature and archives for which sites were already known, to verify the shapes in the raw point cloud, and to draft a report to INAH, Mexico's heritage institute, which they translated into Spanish.
How it went
Overnight the agents flagged many villages and regular shapes. After a few hours of archive checks they named one hilltop site with a levelled plaza, an oval pyramid about 8 to 12 m tall, a raised courtyard and a possible reservoir that did not seem to be registered. The point-cloud slices showed the shapes were on the ground, not in the trees. Miotti sent the report on 20 October and INAH replied the next day that no registered site exists at that location. It is not an official discovery yet; a field check is up to INAH.
Worth knowing
HN commenters accepted that the lidar shows human-made structures but doubted the agents' story of what the site was, and noted the post does not say whether Miotti checked the agents' work by hand. Others warned that publishing new sites helps looters; the coordinates went in a confidential annex. The post does not name the agent harness or models that ran the 48 agents.