Pietro Miotti, a self-described non-archaeologist, orchestrated a fleet of 48 AI agents to scan approximately 1,200 square kilometers of NASA lidar data in a single overnight run. The swarm flagged a hilltop site in the Maya region featuring a plaza, a raised courtyard, and an oval pyramid estimated to be between 8 and 12 meters tall. Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) responded that no registered archaeological site exists at the coordinates provided, sparking immediate interest across the AI and archaeology communities.

The Hacker’s Approach to Lidar

The concept originated during Miotti’s vacation in Peru in October, where he was reading about Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu. After consulting large language models including Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok, he was directed toward lidar technology, which uses laser pulses to map ground surfaces beneath dense forest canopies. When he discovered NASA’s free lidar archive did not cover Peru, he pivoted to the Maya region, converting raw lidar strips into visual inputs for his agent swarm.

Agent Coordination and Verification

Miotti did not employ a specialized proprietary model for this task; instead, he relied on standard agents guided by a written instruction set. The 48 agents processed the images sequentially, specifically hunting for pyramids, platforms, and plazas while actively filtering out natural formations like sinkholes, hills, and roads. Once a candidate site was identified, the agents were tasked with verifying the shapes against the raw lidar data to ensure the anomalies were physical structures rather than data artifacts.

INAH’s Official Response

After translating the report into Spanish and submitting the exact location in a confidential annex, Miotti received a formal reply from INAH. The institute stated, "no registered archaeological site was identified at the location given in your report." This clarification is critical: it confirms the site is absent from current federal records but does not validate the existence of a new discovery. The site remains under 10 to 17 meters of forest cover, making visual confirmation difficult without ground-penetrating technology or physical excavation.

Key Takeaways

  • 48 AI agents scanned 1,200 square kilometers of NASA lidar data in one night.
  • The site features a possible oval pyramid 8-12 meters tall and a reservoir.
  • INAH confirmed the location is not on their registry of archaeological sites.
  • Fieldwork requires INAH approval, and Miotti has offered to assist in verification.

The Bottom Line

This incident proves that autonomous agent swarms can now perform high-volume, low-cost pattern recognition on complex scientific datasets, effectively acting as a first-pass filter for human experts. The barrier to entry for 'citizen science' has collapsed; we are no longer just chatting with LLMs, we are deploying them as digital explorers in the wild.