Show HN: I 3D scanned the tunnels inside the Maya Pyramid Temples at Copan

Matterport's SDK is so good -- I'm so impressed with the details like mobile performance the more time I spend building with it.

I did take some scans after the collapse! After we'd dug ourselves out and crawled out on our bellies, I went back with Polycam. The collapsed section we dug through was comparatively small, maybe 4-5 meters: Section 1: https://poly.cam/capture/4BB863F2-1CC3-46E3-8BDB-232EE3057BD...? (you can see where we crawled out to the intersection here -- the whole intersection had ceiling collapse, but only the section we dug out through was fully covered). Section 2: https://poly.cam/capture/3C5BB7BD-5FC9-4C00-AE1C-84E0544C51C...

We're just lucky it wasn't a rocky ceiling that fell, that would've been much worse.

The team taking care of the tunnels is doing an amazing job with the resources they have, and they're continually backfilling tunnels now and maintaining the ones that are there. It took us about an hour to dig out.

You can compare to the intersection in the matterport version in the same vicinity: https://my.matterport.com/show/?m=r5BR6K6Qxix&ss=338&sr=-.21...

I don't want to editorialize too much, but at that moment we were totally brothers--I was still early with Spanish, and the language, country, age differences fell away, and we dug ourselves out.

It is so hard! The long tunnel sections were the worst, but thankfully most of them had multiple join points, like in the Temple 16 / Rosalila temple excavations.

The fact that people carved this tunnels with simple tools and their bare hands into the underground is so freaking amazing i cant find better words for it

Edit: also very nice tool :)!

I'm a nobody, but I've stumbled across your site before. Kudos and be sure to let the HN community know how we can help.

I love the inscriptions too--the stela only get more meaningful the more you learn about them. But it's kind of like Egypt, the iconography is harder to understand because we inherited from a different culture.

For me, the Maya have always been important because they're our history and our stories in the Americas (I'm from the US) -- more than the greco-roman mythology I grew up with. They grew corn and love ball games. Their stories are more directly our stories, and their struggles are our struggles.

Not to be political, but they also kind of wiped themselves out by large scale environmental collapse, and the jungle is filled with their undiscovered monuments. There's still so much to learn.

People really geek out on how much the Maya knew about astronomy too -- they shot archaeoastronomy docs twice while I was working on site. Richard Feynman even helped decipher Maya glyphs and writes about it in "Surely you're joking Mr Feynman". He gave a lecture also if the audio file can be checked out somehow: https://collections.archives.caltech.edu/repositories/2/acce...