LiDAR and the Politics of Memory in the Yucatán Peninsula

This text argues that airborne LiDAR, while transformative for Maya archaeology, operates as an archival technology shaped by filtering, classification, and visualization routines that privilege built form and infrastructural legibility. These processes enact "archival violence" by suppressing vegetal, ecological, and multispecies histories embedded in the landscape. The article situates LiDAR within the broader visual politics of the Plantationocene, showing how its geometric simplifications parallel colonial cartographic logics and contemporary extractive industries such as plantation agriculture and mining. Yet LiDAR also contains counter-archival potential: raw point-cloud data and multispectral returns preserve information about canopy structure, disturbance histories, and subtle landscape modifications that reveal everyday, subaltern, and ecological narratives. When interpreted through historical ecology and Indigenous spatial ontologies, vegetation becomes a living archive that resists LiDAR's reductive tendencies. The text calls for expanding LiDAR interpretation beyond bare-earth models to honor the complexity of ecological and cultural memory.