AI agents flagged a Maya site already documented in research

Pietro Miotti said the idea came to him while traveling in Peru and thinking about how historic explorers might use modern technology. He chose lidar, which uses lasers to create detailed three-dimensional maps of the environment, and deployed 48 AI agents to search NASA lidar data for possible archaeological sites. Public lidar coverage of Peru was limited, he wrote, so he redirected the search to the Maya region.

The agents identified several locations they considered promising, including what Miotti called “one major village [that] doesn’t seem to have been registered” in existing records. He told The Verge that the work was a personal side project and used no Google computing resources or other support. Miotti said he contacted Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) to ask whether the location was known, including through unpublished research. He used the agents to translate his messages into Spanish and said INAH replied that it had no record of a registered site there.

But the location had already been discovered and published in an academic journal the year before. The episode prompted online criticism from archaeologists. It also reflects a broader tension as people using increasingly powerful AI tools move into specialist areas, sometimes without the knowledge needed to assess what they find. Local communities, too, are often already familiar with archaeological sites in their area.