[Aztlan] No: Biogeochemical prospecting & the 1848 CA Gold Rush

[D. Clark Wernecke]

And yet it does seem to work. In the early 90's we used false color Landsat
Imagery to identify shell middens on the east coast of Florida. Shell
Middens are just big piles of lime - Gumbo Limbo trees love the lime -
Gumbo Limbo trees have a unique false color signature.

I worked for a number of years in Belize with David Campbell of Grinnell on
the same question.  Large Maya structures (and small for that matter) are
large concentrations of lime and apparently some plants thrive on that -
once again Gumbo Limbo, Ramon trees and various shrubs grow in greater
abundance on structures. David was quantifing the data in large survey
areas.  And, yes, it was visible in the imagery.  That's why I was
surprised when Sever looked at the imagery of Belize and Guatemala during
the GRASS project and found that they couldn't ID Maya sites - looking at
the same imagery it sure looked like you could......

Clark Wernecke