Today, you can help 麻豆映画传媒 anthropologists Arlen and Diane Chase, 麻豆映画传媒鈥檚 very own Indiana Jones team, beat researchers who have excavated the South African site of Sterfontein as part of ArchaeoMadness 2014, a contest to celebrate International Archaeology Day.

Their work includes the first wide use of LIDAR (laser) technology to explore underground ruins. Their findings have revolutionized our understanding of how the Maya traded, explored, worshiped and ran their empire that stretched from current day Belize to Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, as well as the Yucatan Peninsula.

The Archaeological Institute of America and other organizations across the nation and Canada organize the day (Oct. 18) and multiple activities to 鈥渃elebrate archaeology and the thrill of discovery.鈥�

麻豆映画传媒鈥檚 College of Sciences is hosting an event at Cocina 214, a restaurant in Winter Park on Oct. 15. The event is already at capacity. Professor Arthur Demarest, the director of the Vanderbilt Institute of Mesoamercian Archaeology and a colleague of the Chases, will speak about the collapse and abandonment of Classic Period Maya cities.

Demarest will also give a lecture to students at 麻豆映画传媒 as part of his visit.

In the meantime, help the Chases win today鈥檚 challenge and keep checking the contest website. Winners from the daily challenges go head to head each day leading up to the final winner, which will be crowned on Oct. 17.

The center is now in the Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning in Classroom Building 1, Room 207H.

Biology Professor Linda Walters has been named interim director after Professor Leslie Lieberman retired as director earlier this year.

鈥淭he center did great work when it was in Research Park,鈥� said Executive Vice Provost Diane Chase, who oversees the center. 鈥淒r. Lieberman provided some outstanding leadership before she retired. Now it鈥檚 time to evaluate and figure out how best we build on her accomplishments.鈥�

The center opened in 2001 to elevate the prominence of 麻豆映画传媒 research relevant to women and to enhance the research capacity of 麻豆映画传媒 faculty women. Goals included promoting research opportunities, building partnerships and bridging research in a variety of disciplines.

Those goals are still relevant, Chase said, but the center is looking to broaden its role to support research about and for women, and to encourage the development of women on 麻豆映画传媒鈥檚 faculty.

That鈥檚 why the move to the Faculty Center for Teaching & Learning is ideal, Walters said.

鈥淭here is so much going on there already,鈥� she said. 鈥淲e will be building on those programs and offering seminars and other opportunities to enhance the resources available to faculty.鈥�

Among the new projects already in the works are a successful-women seminar series showcasing successes within and outside academia, including Chase as the first speaker; one-on-one mentoring sessions with faculty; a revamped web site full of relevant resources that all faculty will find useful, and think tanks and discussion sessions aimed at helping shape the future of the center.

Walters is especially interested in making the center a resource center for as many faculty members as possible.

Running the center is only part of Walters鈥� duties. She will continue to teach and conduct research for which she has earned national recognition. She鈥檚 won numerous grants for marine-conservation research and Volusia County honored her commitment and passion to education, research and the environment by declaring Nov. 6 as Dr. Linda Walters Day.

A search for a director will be conducted in about 18 months. For now, Walters said she鈥檚 excited to help shape the center鈥檚 mission for the next decade.

For more information about the center, drop by, call 407-823-4240, or email linda.walters@ucf.edu or frances.ragsdale@ucf.edu

Since 2001, Waldrop has served as vice chancellor for research and economic development at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In this position, he has been responsible for 12 university-wide research support offices and 15 research centers.

Previously, Waldrop was vice chancellor for research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has a B.A. in Political Science, an M.A. in Physical Education and a Ph.D. in Physiology, all from UNC.

鈥淒r. Waldrop鈥檚 leadership at the University of North Carolina has been outstanding, and we are pleased to bring this innovative academic leader and researcher to 麻豆映画传媒,鈥� said President John Hitt. 鈥淭ony will help us continue to offer an affordable, high-quality education to support a wide range of scholarship in the classic disciplines and emerging fields. He also will help us continue to support the economic, cultural, intellectual and societal needs of Central Florida.鈥�

Waldrop will start at 麻豆映画传媒 on Aug. 1. Provost and Executive Vice President Terry Hickey, who has held the position since 2003, will retire on June 30. Vice Provost Diane Chase will serve as interim provost.

The provost is the second-highest ranking officer of the university and provides academic leadership for the university鈥檚 12 colleges, multiple campuses and research centers and institutes. The provost oversees academic support services and student services and is responsible for curriculum, academic planning, faculty appointments, faculty development and promotion and tenure decisions.

鈥淭he opportunity to help 麻豆映画传媒 continue to 鈥楻each for the Stars鈥� as one of the nation鈥檚 premier universities is very exciting,鈥� Waldrop said. 鈥淢y experiences and personal goals are very consistent with the university鈥檚 goals. I鈥檓 looking forward to getting started and meeting and working with 麻豆映画传媒鈥檚 faculty, staff and students.鈥�

Waldrop will be coming to a growing metropolitan research university with more than 53,500 students, more than 10,000 employees and external research funding of $121.7 million.聽The average SAT score for the fall 2009 freshman class was 1225, and the university ranks in the top聽50 among universities and colleges enrolling National Merit Scholars

麻豆映画传媒 received 93 applications from around the country for the position. A committee of faculty and staff members, chaired by College of Sciences Dean Peter Panousis, led the search and interview process.

鈥淚t speaks highly of 麻豆映画传媒 that so many qualified leaders from around the country applied for this position,鈥� Hitt said. 鈥淚 commend Dr. Panousis and the committee for the hard work they put into this important process.鈥�

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.

In only four days, a twin-engine aircraft equipped with an advanced version of lidar (light detection and ranging) flew back and forth over the jungle and collected data surpassing the results of two and a half decades of on-the-ground mapping, the archaeologists said. After three weeks of laboratory processing, the almost 10 hours of laser measurements showed topographic detail over an area of 80 square miles, notably settlement patterns of grand architecture and modest house mounds, roadways and agricultural terraces.

鈥淲e were blown away,鈥� Dr. Diane Chase said recently, recalling their first examination of the images. 鈥淲e believe that lidar will help transform Maya archaeology much in the same way that radiocarbon dating did in the 1950s and interpretations of Maya hieroglyphs did in the 1980s and 鈥�90s.鈥�

The Chases, who are professors of at the 麻豆映画传媒 in Orlando, had determined from earlier surveys that Caracol extended over a wide area in its heyday, between A.D. 550 and 900. From a ceremonial center of palaces and broad plazas, it stretched out to industrial zones and poor neighborhoods and beyond to suburbs of substantial houses, markets and terraced fields and reservoirs.

This picture of urban sprawl led the Chases to estimate the city鈥檚 population at its peak at more than 115,000. But some archaeologists doubted the evidence warranted such expansive interpretations.

鈥淣ow we have a totality of data and see the entire landscape,鈥� Dr. Arlen Chase said of the laser findings. 鈥淲e know the size of the site, its boundaries, and this confirms our population estimates, and we see all this terracing and begin to know how the people fed themselves.鈥�

The Caracol survey was the first application of the advanced laser technology on such a large archaeological site. Several journal articles describe the use of lidar in the vicinity of Stonehenge in England and elsewhere at an Iron Age fort and American plantation sites. Only last year, Sarah H. Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham predicted, 鈥淟idar imagery will have much to offer the archaeology of the rain forest regions.鈥�

The Chases said they had been unaware of Dr. Parcak鈥檚 assessment, in her book 鈥淪atellite Remote Sensing for Archaeology鈥� (Routledge, 2009), when they embarked on the Caracol survey. They acted on the recommendation of a Central Florida colleague, John F. Weishampel, a biologist who had for years used airborne laser sensors to study forests and other vegetation.

Dr. Weishampel arranged for the primary financing of the project from the little-known space archaeology program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The flights were conducted by the National Science Foundation鈥檚 National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping, operated by the University of Florida and the University of California, Berkeley.

Other archaeologists, who were not involved in the research but were familiar with the results, said the technology should be a boon to explorations, especially ones in the tropics, with its heavily overgrown vegetation, including pre-Columbian sites throughout Mexico and Central America. But they emphasized that it would not obviate the need to follow up with traditional mapping to establish 鈥済round truth.鈥�

Jeremy A. Sabloff, a former director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and now president of the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, said he wished he had had lidar when he was working in the Maya ruins at Sayil, in Mexico.

The new laser technology, Dr. Sabloff said, 鈥渨ould definitely have speeded up our mapping, given us more details and would have enabled us to refine our research questions and hypotheses much earlier in our field program than was possible in the 1980s.鈥�

At first, Payson D. Sheets, a University of Colorado archaeologist, was not impressed with lidar. A NASA aircraft tested the laser system over his research area in Costa Rica, he said, 鈥渂ut when I saw it recorded the water in a lake sloping at 14 degrees, I did not use it again.鈥�

Now, after examining the imagery from Caracol, Dr. Sheets said he planned to try lidar, with its improved technology, again. 鈥淚 was stunned by the crisp precision and fine-grained resolution,鈥� he said.

鈥淔inally, we have a nondestructive and rapid means of documenting the present ground surface through heavy vegetation cover,鈥� Dr. Sheets said, adding, 鈥淥ne can easily imagine, given the Caracol success, how important this would be in Southeast Asia, with the Khmer civilization at places like Angkor Wat.鈥�

In recent reports at meetings of Mayanists and in interviews, the Chases noted that previous remote-sensing techniques focused more on the discovery of archaeological sites than on the detailed imaging of on-ground remains. The sensors could not see through much of the forest to resolve just how big the ancient cities had been. As a consequence, archaeologists may have underestimated the scope of Mayan accomplishments.

For the Caracol survey, the aircraft flew less than a half-mile above the terrain at the end of the dry season, when foliage is less dense. The Airborne Laser Terrain Mapper, as the specific advanced system is named, issued steady light pulses along 62 north-south flight lines and 60 east-west lines. This reached to what appeared to be the fringes of the city鈥檚 outer suburbs and most agricultural terraces, showing that the urban expanse encompassed at least 70 square miles.

Not all the laser pulses transmitted from the aircraft made it to the surface. Some were reflected by the tops of trees. But enough reached the ground and were reflected back to the airborne instruments. These signals, measured and triangulated by GPS receivers and processed by computers, produced images of the surface contours. This revealed distinct patterns of building ruins, causeways and other human modifications of the landscape.

The years the Chases spent on traditional explorations at Caracol laid the foundation for confirming the effectiveness of the laser technology. Details in the new images clearly matched their maps of known structures and cultural features, the archaeologists said. When the teams returned to the field, they used the laser images to find several causeways, terraced fields and many ruins they had overlooked.

The Chases said the new research demonstrates how a large, sustainable agricultural society could thrive in a tropical environment and thus account for the robust Maya civilization in its classic period from A.D. 250 to 900.

鈥淭his will revolutionize the way we do settlement studies of the Maya,鈥� Dr. Arlen Chase said on returning from this spring鈥檚 research at Caracol.

Lidar is not expected to have universal application. Dr. Sheets said that, for example, it would not be useful at his pre-Columbian site at Cer茅n, in El Salvador. The ancient village and what were its surrounding manioc fields are buried under many feet of volcanic ash, beyond laser detection.

Other modern technologies, including radar and satellite imaging, are already proving effective in the land beyond the temples at Angkor, in Cambodia, and in surveys of the Nile delta and ancient irrigation systems in Iraq.

Laser signals breaking through jungle cover are only the newest form of remote sensing in the pursuit of knowledge of past cultures, which began in earnest about a century ago with the advent of aerial photography. Charles Lindbergh drew attention to its application in archaeology with picture-taking flights over unexplored Pueblo cliff dwellings in the American Southwest.

NASA recently stepped up its promotion of technologies developed for broad surveys of Earth and other planets to be used in archaeological research. Starting with a few preliminary tests over the years, the agency has now established a formal program for financing archaeological remote-sensing projects by air and space.

鈥淲e鈥檙e not looking for monoliths on the Moon,鈥� joked Craig Dobson, manager of the NASA space archaeology program.

Every two years, Dr. Dobson said, NASA issues several three-year grants for the use of remote sensing at ancient sites. In addition to the Caracol tests, the program is supporting two other Maya research efforts, surveys of settlement patterns in North Africa and Mexico and reconnaissance of ancient ruins in the Mekong River Valley and around Angkor Wat.

Nothing like a latter-day Apollo project, of course, but the archaeology program is growing, Dr. Dobson said, and will soon double in size, to an annual budget of $1 million.

Source: The New York Times, , by John Noble Wilford, May 10, 2010

The bones come from K’inich Yax K’uk’ Mo’, or KYKM for short, the researchers report in an upcoming Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. KYKM was the first of 16 kings who ruled Cop谩n and surrounding highlands of what is today northern Honduras for about 400 years, from 426 to 820, say archaeologist T. Douglas Price of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues. KYKM’s bone chemistry indicates that he grew up in the central Maya lowlands, which are several hundred kilometers northwest of Cop谩n.

Along with inscriptions at Cop谩n, the new evidence suggests that the site’s first king was born into a ruling family at Caracol, a powerful lowland kingdom in Belize. KYKM probably spent his young adult years as a member of the royal court at Tikal, a Maya kingdom in the central lowlands of Guatemala, before being sent to Cop谩n to found a new dynasty at the settlement there, Price’s team proposes.

“These findings reinforce the notion that the Cop谩n state was founded as part of a colonial expansion,” says archaeologist and study coauthor Robert Sharer of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. “They also demonstrate the widespread connections maintained by Maya kings.” This line of investigation aims to unravel how Classic era Maya city-states, which dominated parts of Mexico and Central America from about 200 to 900, originated and developed.

Hieroglyphics at Cop谩n that were deciphered more than 20 years ago refer to KYKM as a foreigner who was inaugurated as king in 426 and arrived the next year. But it has been unclear whether the inscriptions referred to an actual historical event or were a form of royal propaganda. In 2007, archaeologist David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin noticed that an inscription carved on a Cop谩n stone monument referred to KYKM by a title indicating that he was originally a Caracol lord.

Archaeologists Arlen Chase and Diane Chase of the 麻豆映画传媒 in Orlando, who direct excavations at Caracol, consider it plausible that Cop谩n’s first king was a Caracol lord but doubt that he arrived via Tikal. No signs of a political relationship between Caracol and Tikal appear at the time that KYKM took over at Cop谩n, Arlen Chase notes.

Instead, KYKM probably came directly from Caracol, Arlen Chase says. By the year 150, Caracol hosted numerous royal activities and had extensive ties to settlements near Cop谩n. “It would not be surprising for Cop谩n to have coveted a Caracol individual to become their first ruler,” he says.

Sharer led a team that tunneled beneath the remains of the Cop谩n Acropolis, a private royal complex, about a decade ago. Workers discovered three royal tombs containing skeletons, as well as four individuals buried in pits or beneath platforms outside the tombs.

An impressive vaulted chamber called the Hunal Tomb held the remains of a roughly 55-year-old man’, adorned by several large jade objects. The tomb’s construction style and pottery offerings suggested that the man was powerful, with connections to both Tikal and another Early Classic kingdom, Teotihuacan in central Mexico. Sharer’s team regards the tomb as that of KYKM.

Ratios of strontium and oxygen isotopes in teeth from the Hunal skeleton, along with comparable data for commoners buried at Cop谩n and for animals and people living today in Central America, support that scenario. These measurements reflect local water sources and geology where a person grew up. KYKM spent most of his early years in the Tikal region, the study concludes.

Until researchers gather a more representative sample of isotopic ratios from throughout the Maya area, KYKM’s Caracol origins remain tentative, Stuart remarks.

Three other individuals buried under Cop谩n’s Acropolis came from outside the Cop谩n area, the new study concludes. But a woman in one royal tomb, presumably KYKM’s wife, grew up in Cop谩n

Source: U.S. News & World Report: Science. Original story: Evidence of Ancient Maya Colonial Expansion, by Bruce Bower, Science News, December 19, 2009

“To have four faculty members recognized by their peers for outstanding achievements in science and engineering is an honor for our entire university community,” said M.J. Soileau, vice president for Research and Commercialization. “In classrooms and laboratories throughout our university, students are working with world-class professors who are leaders in their fields.”

Last year, two 麻豆映画传媒 professors — Issa Batarseh of Electrical Engineering and Sudipta Seal of Mechanical, Materials and Aerospace Engineering — were selected as AAAS fellows.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the world’s largest general scientific society, and publisher of the journal, Science as well as Science Translational Medicine and Science Signaling. AAAS was founded in 1848, and it includes some 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals.

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