3,500 year-old city, which gave us Horse Cart Found.

Hyksos, who ruled ancient Egypt for a little over 100 years and their civilized city was found by a team of Austrian archaeologists at Nile Delta.

The ancient Egyptians so reviled the Hyksos- the people who introduced horsedrawn carriages into the world-that they obliterated all traces of their rich civilisation.

Archaeological discovery of the Hyksos capital, Avaris, led by Irena Mueller, deputy director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute, Cairo, will cast muchneeded light on an empire that flourished from 1664 to 1569 BC.

3,500 year-old city, which gave us Horse Cart Found.

Mapping Ancient Civilization, in a Matter of Days

Article appeared on nytimes.com

For a quarter of a century, two archaeologists and their team slogged through wild tropical vegetation to investigate and map the remains of one of the largest Maya cities, in Central America. Slow, sweaty hacking with machetes seemed to be the only way to discover the breadth of an ancient urban landscape now hidden beneath a dense forest canopy.

Even the new remote-sensing technologies, so effective in recent decades at surveying other archaeological sites, were no help. Imaging radar and multispectral surveys by air and from space could not “see” through the trees.

Then, in the dry spring season a year ago, the husband-and-wife team of Arlen F. Chase and Diane Z. Chase tried a new approach using airborne laser signals that penetrate the jungle cover and are reflected from the ground below. They yielded 3-D images of the site of ancient Caracol, in Belize, one of the great cities of the Maya lowlands.

Mapping Ancient Civilization, in a Matter of Days